Adam Johnson - Emporium

He moves slowly, foot and heel, foot and heel, looking up at the sun. We have never seen so much blood, and as he passes the wolves, they go crazy with it, heads pressed against the chain link, eyes rolled back, rear legs digging in place.

He says something through his teeth, something we can’t make out, and looks back at us. He comes to the diving board, but instead of going around, he labors over, arms out, in hard-placed steps. Up, off balance, he stares down his yard, the charring meat, the Saturday this is. He looks back at us again.

“Who are you?” he asks. “What are you doing here?”

He comes down hard, half stumbling, and this is when Marty and Jimbo rush to him. But I don’t rush. I look at that caiman, the red strobe warping across its back and the curve of the blue bottom. It sits motionless, rocking in its own wake, and it looks more fake than ever. I get the urge to kick it, too, but I don’t have the guts.

When I catch up, they are in the garage, lowering Marty’s father into the Chrysler. The goal is to elevate his pumping foot on the dash, but they are forced to settle for the open throat of the glove box. Jimbo turns to me. We are standing by the trunk, giving room, and I really think I will be invited along with the family to pace and fret in the emergency room. Instead, Jimbo unzips his pants and spreads the ears of his fly to reveal the white of his Jockeys. When I realize he doesn’t want to take his dope to the hospital, I just shake my head and unbuckle my pants, looping a thumb in the elastic of my underwear in anticipation. Jimbo reaches deep into his groin and fishes out the sweaty bag of weed just as Marty’s mother rounds the fender. Her shirt reads: RUN, REBELS, RUN!

They all load up and drive away, leaving me looking from the dark garage out into the overbright harrows of sharp-cornered tract homes, and I am alone in a stranger’s garage. On the wall are spray-painted silhouettes of missing tools — wrench, hammer, plane — just the empty hooks, and I become aware of the cool air on my legs, pouring from an open door, past me through the garage and out into the world.

“They gone?” a voice asks. I’d forgotten about the boy.

There is a white plastic intercom near the garage door, and I push the button. “Yeah,” I tell him, “everyone left.”

Out back, I find him balancing a plate of burned meat as he drags a patio chair around the pool, where he parks it in front of the wolves. Except for deeper pockets in the pool-decking, the blood is turning dark and colorless, the dull metallic of high photography or the platinum-black of some fish — a bullhead or drum, maybe — that you see on Freshwater Sportsman .

I pull up a chair and join him, our feet outstretched to the edge of the fence, a move that leaves the wolves insane with rage, slathering each other’s necks, roaring at our faces. The boy throws a piece of meat over the fence, and it just disappears. I, too, grab a fillet and loft it over the short fence. All you see is the sudden white of upstretched necks and the falling punch of the throat that gets it.

We lean back in our chairs then, staring straight at those wolves with our heads cocked in a lazy, curious way.

“What’d you do yesterday?” I ask him.

“I don’t know,” he says.

There are gods who are raised by wolves, but I don’t recall the details. It was one of the seventy-three questions I missed on the midterm.

“You’d think they’d get tired of this.”

“I think it’s the waves from that thing.” The boy nods toward the tower. “That’s what drives them crazy.”

Above, I hear another bird on approach. Wobbling in, it seems to nearly clip the tower.

Bird is a term my mother first picks up from Tammy when they’re flying the Cancun-Kingston-Cayman triangle eight times a week. It is outbound from Jamaica that my mother’s bird, an MD-80 wide-body with bad fuel lines, drops seventeen thousand feet over Cuba. Tammy, with her overtan skin and tired blue eyes, tells my mother that drops happen, that you can learn to love the thrill.

I look up at the flashing tower, and this boy’s radio-wave theory makes a certain kind of sense, but the mystery I’m trying to solve is what in the world keeps these wolves from coming over the fence.

The stupid part of this story is that the next day we all still go to Fly Away, Jimbo, Marty, and me. It is late afternoon when we arrive, the sun setting over the Vegas strip as we wait before a big muraled door out back by the Dumpsters. Its painting depicts a free-falling woman, limbs out, hair rushing up like fire, and, knowing this must be her, I study the tight body and thin scowl until the door opens to reveal its model, Tasha in the flesh, looking bored and irritable in yellow goggles and a signal-orange jumpsuit. I see the artist captured nearly perfectly the sullen indifference in Tasha’s eyes, which can’t be easy when you’re painting in big jugs and winking lashes.

She eyeballs Marty and shakes her head. “You owe me.”

We follow her in the back way, where we sit in preflight until the last paying customers of the day leave and Fly Away is ours. Between rows of echoing lockers, we strip to our underwear in front of her. Marty still has a quarterback’s body and Jimbo’s an ottoman of a man, but at the sight of me Tasha shakes her head, hands on hips, and decides I’ll need a red drag suit, extralarge.

“Where’d you get the scar?” she asks, eyeing my sternum.

“I was a kid,” I tell her. “I took a tumble.”

Jimbo and Marty bake the last of their dope through a toiletpaper tube while suiting up slowly and without conversation. Tasha sits on a metal stool, watching as I strap into that red suit. She fixes her earplugs, removing then replacing them.

“You don’t talk much,” she says, licking the tips of the plugs before screwing them back in. “Not that that’s bad.”

“What’s there to say?”

She leans forward, points at her ear. “What?” she asks.

Finally she leads us to the control room above the flight chamber, where she presets the engine with a bank of digital switches and relays. With little fanfare, we follow her downstairs to a round chamber, where, in a two-hundred-mile-per-hour wind, I fly. The padding on the walls is red vinyl, rolled and tucked, like the choice upholstery of an old Cadillac. Hovering over the wire mesh that separates me from the motor, I don’t try any flips or fancy moves. I just float eye-level with those who hug the sides, waiting their turns while I take too long, as I am held transfixed, staring straight down the maw of a DC-3.

For the others, there are stunts and bloopers, amazing vaults and gymnastics from Tasha, but I don’t really see any of it. After thirty minutes, the engine winds itself down, and we wiggle off our helmets to reveal sweaty, matted hair. Marty and Jimbo compare flight stories, gesturing with their hands like fins, their voices echoing with the strange sound in there, and I don’t feel so hot.

Tasha comes over and places two fingers on my neck, clocking my pulse on her watch. The move surprises me at first, but there is purpose in her fingers, and I sense she knows what she’s feeling for. She leans in close for her reading, and at this height I can watch how her ribs finger her suit when she exhales.

“You take everyone’s pulse?”

“Only ones that look like you. They gave us a course on it.” She nods at the motor below. “You know, heart attacks.”

“Nothing’s wrong with my heart,” I say. “How do I look?”

“I’ve got that same scar on my chest, so save the story.”

“From the crash?”

Marty just hears the edge of this but pipes in, “Don’t get her started on that crash.”

“Shut up,” she says to him, and then turns back to me. “You’re okay. You look good.” She adjusts her fingers on my neck, pushes harder.