Joseph McElroy: Taken From Him

Has it lain in the sun right here on the bridge wall another day? Today? What is fear, intervening upon time so time is gone, is it even fear turning to softly tread the dirt road between the two low walls of the brief bridge? Does it eat your heart? Does what eat your heart? Tear your shirt; eat your clothes, like a goat — even, in one’s own experience, a dog obsessed with the smell of a sweater? The leopard likes blood, we know that. Even ours.

Experience alive, yet nothing. The reservoir in the other direction behind you, The camera must not click. An alarm intervening to make another time from this, though what? The visitor has crossed slowly the little roadway of the bridge, looking back also and around, around, fear welcoming curiosity stupidly. Reaching the other low wall reluctant to look down on the far side — but now to find, ten yards beyond — so a hand reaches for the cement, interrupts the camera swinging forward on its strap, leaves the camera somehow even more useless — the rust-reddish back of the animal in shadow, a white mark visible on the rump, its tail up, which might mean it has fed. On its way, already gone. Toward the reservoir out there glimpsed. On the move, in the viewfinder, the leopard scarcely stirs leaves it passes under toward the reservoir not a hundred yards off the road. This leopard has passed from beneath the bridge you stand on and along the hardly visible glint of the stream. We had to keep the creature in our sights or it’s gone, like a deer, and like its tread following its made path.

Will the ears hear, will the brain of the cat hear and take action, turn back, seeing us come down from the bridge near the stream? or be gone sooner, knowing a man follows it? Leopards will swim but when? There was a path, some packed earth half-hidden by arching ferns, a large, isolated basaltic rock in the way to make us forget the leopard might be coming back, the clumsy noise we make.

The light is of the clearing and the wide water. At the shore this is like a lake we know. Is the leopard suddenly forgotten? How is that possible? A long, low, modest dam one might walk along carefully while on the down side falling water precipitated into a stream turning off into the forest.

Leopards will swim. Up the shore on the right, the lone head, the ears, of the still great and heavy cat above the water, black markings behind the ears, centerless rosettes — as steady as an eight-point buck swimming a New Hampshire lake at dawn or across the tidal strait of Arthur Kill from Perth Amboy to Staten Island: a predator, though, and, no, the head does move, the shoulders surge with intent.

The engine coming without warning you try to see through the woods between here and the bridge. And find through some moment of time framed by branches, trunks, leaves of silence a yellow fragment in sunlight of the bus and hear nothing else as the motor cuts off. Straining with memory, too, to see who it is, you find a scrap of blue you know, And hear no talk, no strife, and think.

Yet then, for we’ve lost touch, the leopard is gone, gone ashore somewhere known further up the forest shore. This is not the reservoir where a crocodile was seen. That would be a larger lake also supplying water for the City.

The bus parked diagonally blocking the little bridge, you could smell it and see now what had been recalled as some speeding opaqueness, the side windows tightly fenced from outside to protect the passengers, not built-in wire in shatterproof glass, nor finely barred, though like a Corrections van in New York. The girl is alone. “I took the bus,” she said, perhaps hearing the joke but it is more. “I thought he would follow me. It was an emergency, I never did this be fore.” In a near whisper, “You will tell me what happened, I know you have b ee n with the leopard. They saw it lying on the wall of the bridge in the sun one day.” Looking at her watch, “You have time to catch a taxi and meet your people, they are vis it ing the architect I told you of right downtown in New Mumbai.” She names him, an important name. “It is al most your last stop in India.”

She was telling him what he knew but had nearly lost interest in, listening for a Vespa, feeling the weight of the camera. Her eyes are brave. Her body. What will happen to her? “Tell me what happened,” she says. “Tell me.”