Adam Johnson - Emporium

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 running 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.

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.