Wild Child and Other Stories

  He’d let his grin flag, but it came back now, a boy’s grin, the grin that had no doubt got him whatever he wanted wherever he went. He pushed the hat back till the roots of his hair showed in front, squared his shoulders and gathered in his legs. She saw that he was her age, or close enough, and she saw too that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “A little early for me,” he said, and his laugh was genuine. “But if you’re going to have one—”

  She was already pouring. “I told you,” she said, “I work nights.”

  The wine was one of her few indulgences—it was from a little California vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley. She and her sister Mae had gone wine-tasting when she was visiting over Christmas and she liked the faint dry echo of the chardonnay so much she had two cases shipped back to Wisconsin. Her impulse was to hoard it, but she was feeling generous this morning, expansive in a way that had nothing to do with the two scotches or the way the trailer ticked and hummed over its heating element and a feeble cone of rinsed-out sunshine poked through the blinds. “This is cocktail hour for me,” she said, handing him the glass, “my chance to kick back before dinner.”

  “Right,” he said, “just about the time everybody else is getting to work with crumbs in their lap and a cardboard cup of lukewarm coffee. I used to work nights,” he said. “At a truck stop. I know how it is.”

  She’d eased into the chair opposite him, his legs snaking out again as if he couldn’t contain them, boots crossed at the ankles, then uncrossed and crossed again. “So what do you do now?” she asked, wishing she’d had a chance to put on some lipstick, brush her hair. In time, though. In time she would. Especially if he stayed for a second glass.

  His eyes, which had never strayed from hers since he hunched through the door, slipped away and then came back again. He shrugged. “This and that.”

  She had nothing to say to this and they were silent a moment as they sipped their wine and listened to the wind run at the trailer. “You like it?” she said finally.

  “Hm?”

  “The wine.”

  “Oh, sure, yeah. I’m not much of a connoisseur, I’d say . . . but yeah, definitely.”

  “It’s a California wine. My sister lives out there. Got it right from the winery itself.”

  “Nice,” he said, and she could see he was just being polite. Probably the next thing he would say was that he was more of a beer man himself.

  She wanted to say more, wanted to tell him about the vineyard, the neat braided rows of grapevines curling round the hills and arcing down into the little valleys like the whorls of a shell, about the tasting room and the feel of the sun on her face as she and Mae sat outside at a redwood table and toasted each other and the power of healing and the beginning of a new life for them both, but she sensed he wouldn’t be interested. So she leaned in then, elbows propped on the knees of the pale blue cotton scrubs she wore to work every night, his legs splayed out in front of her as if he’d been reclining there all his life, and said, “So what is this question you wanted to ask me about, anyway?”

  The more she talked, the more the tiger seemed to settle down. Before long it stopped pacing, leaned into the rails of the fence and let its body melt away till it was lying there in the dirt and devil grass as if it had somehow found the one place in the world that suited it best. There was the sound of the birds—a jay calling harshly from the next yard over, a songbird swapping improvisations with its mate—and the soughing rumble of a car going up the street behind the house, and then she could hear the tiger’s breathing as clearly as if she were sitting in the living room listening to it come through Doug’s stereo speakers. It wasn’t purring, not exactly, but there was a glottal sound there, deep and throaty, and after a moment she realized the animal was asleep and that what she was hearing was a kind of snore, a sucking wheeze, in and out, in and out. She was amazed. Struck dumb. How many people had heard a tiger snore? How many people in the world, in the history of the world, let alone Moorpark? What she felt then was grace, a grace that descended on her from the gray roof of the morning, a sense of privilege and intimacy no one on earth was feeling. This animal didn’t belong to her, she knew that—it had an owner somewhere and he would be out looking for it, the police would be here soon, dogs, trackers, guns—but the moment did.

  “Well, let me put it this way,” he was saying, “I see you got some ferals living under your trailer . . .”

  “Ferals?” At first she thought he’d meant ferrets and she gave his hat a closer scrutiny. Was that what that was, ferret fur?

  “Cats. Stray cats.”

  He was studying her intently, challenging her with his eyes. She shrugged. “Three or four of them. They come and go.”

  “You’re not feeding them, are you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good,” he said, and then repeated himself with a kind of religious fervor, his voice echoing off the molded plastic of the ceiling. She saw that his glass was empty, clutched in one oversized hand and balanced delicately over the crotch of his jeans. “Because they’re bird killers, you know. Big time. You ever notice feathers scattered around?”

  “Not really.” This was the moment to look at her own empty glass and hold it up to the light. “But hey, I’m going to have another—help me sleep. How about you?”

  He waved his hand in a vague way, which she took to mean yes, and she lifted the bottle from the coffee table and held it aloft a moment so that the pale light through the window caught the label, then leaned forward, way out over the gulf of his parted thighs, to pour for him. He didn’t thank her. Didn’t even seem to notice. “I like birds,” he said. “I love birds. I’ve been a member of the Audubon Society since I was in sixth grade, did you know that?”

  She didn’t know that, how could she?—she’d just met him ten minutes ago. But she’d always liked tall men and she liked the way he’d settled in, liked the way things were going. His brow furrowed, his eyes leapt out at her: he was a preacher, after all. So what did she do? She poured herself a glass of wine and shrugged again. Let him talk.

  “Anyway,” he said, and he drank off half the glass in a gulp, “anyway—this is good stuff, I see what you mean. But the cats. Did you know there are something like two million stray cats in this state alone and that they’re responsible for killing between forty-seven million to a hundred and thirty-nine million native songbirds a year, depending on the estimate? A hundred and thirty-nine million.” He drew up his legs, the boots sliding away from her and clapping lightly together as he sat up erect in the chair. “Now that’s outrageous, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah,” she said, sipping California, tasting the sun on her tongue, the earth, the trees, the vines that wove the hills into a big green fruit-hung tapestry. Robert had been five-eleven, an inch taller than she, and that was fine, that was all right, because she’d had her fill of blind dates and friends of friends who came up to her clavicle, but she’d always wondered what it would be like to date a man who made her feel short. And vulnerable. Somebody who could pull her head to his chest and just squeeze till she felt the weight go out of her legs.

  “So that’s why I’m here,” he said, studying the pale gold of the wine in the clear crystal of the glass, before tilting his head to throw back what remained. “That’s why I’m going house to house to drum up support for Question 62—for the birds. To save the birds.”

  She felt as if she were drifting, uncontained, floating right up and out through the ceiling of the trailer to blow off on the wind as if she were a bird herself—two scotches and two glasses of wine on a mostly empty stomach, the Lean Cuisine Salmon Gratin with Lemon & Dill sitting frozen on the counter. Still, she had the presence of mind to lean back in the chair, let out a deep breath and focus a smile on him. “All right,” she said, “you got me—what’s Question 62?”

  The answer consumed the next ten minutes, during which she put on her listening expression and poured them each another half glass of wine and the presence of the sun grew f
irmer as it sliced the blinds into plainly delineated stripes that began ever so slowly to creep across the carpet. Question 62, he told her, was coming up for a vote in seventy-two counties on the twelfth of April and it was as simple as this: should cats be listed as an unprotected species like skunks and gophers and other nuisance animals? They were coldly efficient predators and they were interfering with the ecosystem. They were killing off birds and outcompeting native animals like hawks, owls and foxes for prey, and the long and short of it was that any cat found roaming without a collar could be hunted without a license or season or bag limit.

  “Hunted?” she said. “You mean, with a gun? Like deer or something?”

  “Like gophers,” he said. “Like rats.” His eyes were fierce and he leaned over his empty glass as if he were about to snatch it up and grind it between his teeth. He was sweating, a translucent runnel of fluid leaching out of his hairline and into the baffle of his right eyebrow; in a single motion he shrugged out of his parka and pulled off the hat to reveal a full head of russet hair streaked blond at the tips. He was staring right into her.

  “I don’t like guns,” she said.

  “Guns’re a fact of life.”

  “My husband was killed by a gun.” As she said it, a flat statement of fact, she saw Robert lying in the dirt not fifty feet from where they were sitting now and she heard the sirens and the gunshots, and the face of Tim Palko from the trailer across the way came back to her, Tim Palko, drunk for a week after he lost his job and gone crazy with his deer rifle till the SWAT team closed in and he put the barrel of it in his own mouth and jerked the trigger one last time. But she’d seen death—she saw it every week at the Page Center—and when she looked out the window of the trailer after the first shot thumped through the afternoon like the beat of a bass drum that never reverberated, she could see from the way Robert was lying there that it had come for him and come instantly. Mae had said, How could you be sure?, but she had two eyes and she knew absolutely and incontrovertibly, and that knowledge, cold as it was, grim as it was, saved her. If I’d run out there, Mae,she told her, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.

  The man—Todd—dropped his eyes, made a noise in the back of his throat. They were silent a moment, just listening to the wind, and then the clouds closed in and the sun failed and the room grew a shade darker, two shades, and she reached for the pull on the lamp. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It must be hard.”

  She didn’t answer. She studied his face, his hands, the nervous bounce of his right heel. “What I was thinking,” she said finally, “is maybe opening another bottle. Just one more glass. What do you say?”

  He looked up at her with that grin, the grin resurrected in the space of a heartbeat to make everything all right again. “I don’t know,” he sighed, and he was watching her now, watching her as intently as he’d been a moment ago when he was delivering his speech, “but if I have another glass I’m going to want to lay down. How about you? You feel like laying down?”

  For a long while Mae crouched there in the wet earth, toying with the idea of backing noiselessly across the lawn so she could slip next door to the Kaprielians’ and see if she could maybe borrow or purchase some meat—steak, rump roast, whatever they had—and she’d pay them later because this was an emergency and she couldn’t talk about it now. Meat, that was what she needed. Any kind of meat. She had a fantasy of dropping wet slabs of it across the lawn in a discontinuous path that snaked up the gravel walk and through the open door of the garage, the big cat lured inside where it would settle down to sleep over a full belly between the dryer and the Toyota. But no. She hardly knew the Kaprielians. And what she did know of them she didn’t like, the husband a big-bellied inimical presence bent perpetually over the hood of his hot rod or whatever it was and the wife dressed like some sort of hooker even in the morning when she went out to the driveway to retrieve the newspaper . . .

  She didn’t believe in meat and neither did Doug. That was one of the things that had attracted her to him, one of the things they had in common, though there were other things—mountains of them, replete with ridges and declensions and towering heights—in which they were polar opposites. But Doug had worked two summers in a chicken plant in Tennessee, snatching the chickens up out of their cages to suspend them on a cable by their clamped feet so they could proceed to the pluckers and gutters, and he’d vowed never again to touch a piece of meat as long as he lived. He’d strung up tens of thousands of bewildered birds, their wings flapping in confusion amidst the chicken screech and the chicken stink, one after another heading down the line to have their heads removed and their innards ripped out. What did they ever do to us, he said, his face twisted with the memory of it, to deserve that?

  She was still down on her knees, her eyes fixed on the swell of the tiger’s ribs as they rose and fell in the decelerating rhythm of sleep, thinking maybe she could give it eggs, a stainless steel pan with raw egg and then a line of individual eggs just tapped enough to show the yolk, when the back door of the neighbors’ house jerked open with a pneumatic wheeze and there was the Kaprielian woman, in her bathrobe and heels no less, letting the two yapping Pomeranians out into the yard. That was all it took to break the spell. The door wheezed shut, the dogs blew across the grass like down in a stiff wind, and the tiger was gone.

  Later, after the dogs had got through sniffing and yapping and the neighborhood woke to the building clangor of a Saturday morning in March—doors slamming, voices rising and falling and engines of every conceivable bore and displacement screaming to life—she sat with Doug at the kitchen table and stared out into the gray vacancy of the backyard, where it had begun to rain. Doug was giving the paper his long squint. He’d lit a cigarette and he alternated puffs with delicate abbreviated sips of his second cup of overheated coffee. He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt stained with the redwood paint he’d used on the picnic table. At first he hadn’t believed her. “What,” he’d said, “it’s not April Fools’, not yet.” But then, there it was in the paper—a picture of a leathery white-haired man, a tracker, bent over a pugmark in the mud near a dude ranch in Simi Valley, and then they turned on the TV and the reporter was standing there in the backwash of the helicopter’s blades, warning people to stay inside and keep their pets with them because some sort of exotic cat had apparently got loose and could be a potential danger—and they’d both gone out back and studied the ground along the fence in silence.

  There was nothing there, no sign, nothing. Just dirt. The first few spatters of rain feathered the brim of her hat, struck at her shoulders. For a moment she thought she could smell it, the odor released in a sprinkle of rain, the smell of litter, fur, the wild, but then she couldn’t be sure.

  Doug was staring at her, his eyes pale and wondering. “You really saw it?” he said. “Really? You’re not shitting me, right?” In the next moment he went down on his heels and thrust his hand through the slats of the fence to pat the ground as if it were the striped hide of the animal itself.

  She looked down at the top of his head, the hair matted and poorly cut, his bald spot spinning in a whorl of its own, galactic, a whole cosmos there. She didn’t bother to answer.

  Todd barely fit the bed, which occupied its own snug little cubbyhole off the wall of the master bedroom, and twice, in his passion, he sat up abruptly and cracked his head on the low-slung ceiling, and she had to laugh, lying there naked beneath him, because he was so earnest, so eager in his application. But he was tender too, and patient with her—it had been a long time, too long, and she’d almost forgotten what a man could make her feel like, a man other than Robert, a stranger with a new body, new hands and tongue and groin. New rhythm. New smell. Robert had smelled of his mother, of the sad damp house he’d grown up in, carpet slippers and menthol, the old dog and the mold under the kitchen sink and the saccharine spice of the aftershave he tried to cover it all up with. Todd’s smell was different, fresher somehow, as if he’d just come back from a roll in
the snow, but there was something else too, something darker and denser, and she held him a long while, her face pressed to the back of his head, before she understood what it was: the lingering scent of the fur hat that was lying now on the couch in the other room. She thought of that and then she was gone, deep in her coma, the whole world closing down on her cubbyhole in the wall.

  He left her a note on the kitchen table. She saw it there when she got up for work, the windows dark and the heater ticking away like a Geiger counter. His hand was free-flowing, shapely, and that pleased her, the care that went into it, what it said about him as an individual. The words were pretty special too. He said that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met in his life and that he was going to take her out to breakfast in the morning, make it a date, if that was all right with her, and he signed his full name, Todd Jefferson Gray, and wrote out his address and phone number beneath it.

  Next morning, when her shift was over, she walked across the snow-scabbed lot to her car, her spirits rising with every step. She never doubted he’d be there, not for a minute, but she couldn’t help craning her neck to sweep the lot, expecting him to emerge from one car or another, tall and quick-striding, his smile widening. As it was, she didn’t notice him until she was nearly on him—he wasn’t in a car; he didn’t have a car. He was standing just beyond the front bumper of her Saturn with a solemn look on his face, rooted to the ground like one of the trees that rose up behind him in a black tangle. When she was right there, right at the door of the car with the keys in her hand and he still hadn’t moved, she felt confused. “Todd?” she heard herself say. “Is everything all right?”