T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

I’ve had death threats over Question 62—from your cat lovers, the pacifists themselves.”

“Right,” she said. “Like the cats under my trailer are some big threat, aren’t they? Invasive species, right? Well, we’re an invasive species. Mrs. Merker I was telling you about, the one that gets up twenty times a night to find the bathroom and twenty times a night asks me who I am and what I think I’m doing in her house? She’s part of the problem, isn’t she? Why not hunt old ladies too?”

His eyes jumped round the room before they came back to her, exasperated eyes, irritated, angry. “I don’t know. I’m not into that. I mean, that’s people.”

She told herself to shut it down, to pick up the menu and order something innocuous — waffles, with fake maple syrup that spared even the maple trees — but she couldn’t. Maybe it was the drinks, maybe that was it. “But don’t people kill birds? Habitat destruction and whatever, mini-malls, diesel engines and what, plastics. Plastics kill birds, don’t they?”

“Don’t get crazy on me. Because that’s nuts. Just nuts.”

“Just asking.”

“Just asking?” Now the fist did come down on the table, a single propulsive thump that set the silverware rattling and heads turning.

“We’re talking death threats and you think this is some kind of game?” He was on his feet suddenly, the tallest man in the world, the jacket riding up over his belt, his face soaring, all that displacement of air and light. He bent for his hat, then straightened up again, his face contorted. “Some date,” he said, and then he was gone.

The night of the tiger, a night that collapsed across the hills like a wet sack under the weight of yet another storm, Mae kept the television on late, hoping for news. Earlier, she and Doug had thought of going out to dinner and then maybe a movie, but with the rain showing no sign of letting up Doug didn’t think he wanted to risk it and so she’d got creative with some leftover marinara sauce, zucchini and rice and they’d wound up watching an old pastel movie on the classic channel. The movie — they missed the first ten minutes and she never did catch the title — featured Gene Kelly in a sailor suit. Doug, who was working on the last beer of his six-pack, said it should have been Singin’ in the Rain.

That was funny, and though she was distracted — had been distracted all day — she laughed. There was a silence then and they both listened to the rain hammering at the roof — it was so loud, so persistent, that for a moment it drowned out the dialogue on the TV.

“I guess this is it,” Doug said, leaning back in his recliner with a sigh, “—the monsoon. The real deal, huh?” He gestured to the ceiling with the can of beer.

“Yeah,” she said, watching the bright figures glide across the screen, “but I just hope it doesn’t float us away. You think the car’s going to be all right in the driveway?”

He gave her a look of irritation. “It’s only rain.”

“It seems so strange, though, because there’s no thunder, no lightning. It just keeps coming as if somebody’d turned on a big spigot in the sky.” She made a face. “I don’t know. I don’t like it. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it — even the word, monsoon. It’s so bizarre, like something out of some jungle someplace.”

He just shrugged. They’d looked to his career and chosen California — Moorpark — over Atlanta, because, and they were both in absolute agreement here, they didn’t want to live in the South.

And while she loved the idea of year-round gardening — flowers in February and trees that never lost their leaves — she was still feeling her way around the way the seasons seemed to stall and the earth hardened to clay under the unblinking summer sun till it was like brick and nothing would grow along the fence but devil grass and tumbleweeds. Tumbleweeds. She might as well have been in the Wild West.

She’d had two beers herself and her attention was drifting — she couldn’t really focus on the movie, all that movement, singing, dancing, the earnest plot, as if any of this meant anything — and when Doug got up without a word and steadied himself against the arm of the chair before moving off toward the bedroom, she picked up the remote and began flicking through the channels. She was looking for something, anything that might bring her back to what she’d felt that morning, on her knees in the garden with the mist rising round her. The tiger was out there, in the black of the night, the rain steaming round it. That was a thing she could hold on to, an image that grew inside her like something that had been planted there. And they wouldn’t be able to track it, she realized, not now, not in this. After a while she muted the sound and just sat there listening to the rain, hoping it would never stop.

A week went by. The temperature took a nosedive and then it began to snow, off and on, until Saturday, when Anita came out of work to the smell of diesel and the flashing lights of the snowplow and had to struggle through a foot of fresh snow to her car. Her mood was desolate. Mrs. Merker had torn off her Depends and squatted to pee right in front of the nurses’ station and Mr. Pohnert (“Call me Alvin”) kept pressing his buzzer every five minutes to complain that his feet were cold despite the fact that both his legs had been removed five years ago due to complications from diabetes. And there were the usual aggravations, the moans and whimpers and the gagging and retching and people crying out in the dark — the strangeness of the place, insulated and overheated, with its ticking machines and dying bodies and her at the center of it. And now this.

The sky was dark and roiled, the snow flung on the wind in sharp stinging pellets. It took her fifteen minutes to get her car out. And she drove home like a zombie, both hands clenching the wheel even as the tires floated and shimmied over the patches of ice.

There were tracks punched in the snow around her doorstep, cat tracks, amidst a scattering of blue feathers tipped with black. And a flyer, creased down the middle and shoved into the crack of the door. NO ON 62, it said, SAVE OUR PETS. She didn’t have the heart to open a bottle of chardonnay — that she would save for brighter times — but she did make herself a cup of tea and spike it with a shot of Dewar’s while she thought about what she wanted to eat, soup maybe, just a can of Chunky Vegetable and some wheat toast to dip in it. She had the TV on and her feet up before she noticed the blinking light on her message machine. There were two messages.

The first was from Mae—“Call me,” delivered in a tragic voice — and the second, the one she’d been waiting all week for, was from Todd.

He was sorry about the blowup, but he’d been under a lot of pressure lately and he hoped they could get together again — soon, real soon — despite their differences, because they really did have a lot in common and she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met and he’d really like to make it up to her. If she would let him. Please.

She was wondering about that — what exactly they had in common aside from two semi-drunken go-arounds on her bed and the fact that they were both tall and both lived in Waunakee — when the phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring, thinking it was him. “Hello?” she whispered.

“Anita?” It was Mae. Her voice was cored out and empty, beyond tragic, beyond tears. “Oh, Anita, Anita.” She broke off, gathered herself. “They shot the tiger.”

“Who? What tiger?”

“It didn’t even have claws. This beautiful animal, somebody’s pet, and it couldn’t have—”

“Couldn’t have what? What tiger? What are you talking about?”

But the conversation ended there. The connection was broken, either on Mae’s end or hers — she couldn’t be sure until she tried to dial her sister and the phone gave back nothing but static. Somebody had skidded into a telephone pole, that was it, and she wondered how much longer the lights would be on — that would be next, no power — and she got up out of the chair to pull open the tab on the top of the soup can, disgorge the contents into a ceramic bowl and flag the mircrowave while she could. She punched in the three digits and was rewarded by the mechanical roar of the thing starting up, the bowl rotating inside and the visual display of the numbers counting down, 3:30, 3:29, 3:28, until suddenly, in the space of the next second, the microwave choked off and the TV died and the fluorescent strip under the cabinet flickered once and buried its light in a dark tube.