Adam Johnson - Emporium

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 rear 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.