“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.
I turn him around, but I can’t deal with his sullen, angry face. Mac’s arm is scratched pretty good. But I can’t even deal with him. I take the gun, hand him the flashlight, and walk away for the first aid kit. I should bring him to the cart, to where the light is better, though honestly, I don’t want to see him any closer tonight.
Anger has settled to a kind of emptiness by the time I reach the cart. I find the first aid kit and begin the slow walk back to Mac, my son, whom I will patch up with gauze and Bactine. I make my way along the edge of the open desert and I know in a little while I will have to call Sue to come pick him up because even here, in a simple field under the stars, I am ill-suited for any of this.
I reach the spot where Mac should be, and it takes a moment to bring my head back down to earth and realize he is gone. I do a slow turn before I see him standing down by the wolf pen, shirtless, with a rabbit in his hand. He is rattling it temptingly against the chain link while his flashlight follows in its beam the dim image of a wolf in the dark, more eyes than anything as it sidles, circling, on loping legs. Mac is saying things I can’t quite hear. His free fingers hold the mesh, and he is bent some, talking in hushed tones.
I call to him but he does not respond. He seems to finish what he is saying and his awkward body stands up straight. The light turns off. Then his arm lifts to lob the rabbit over the fence and I am moving. I see the rabbit do two slow turns in the air and I am almost running. It lands on the other side, not four feet from where he stands transfixed, fingers wrapped in the fence. Mac, I call.
He rolls his head to look at me blankly and I slow some. Soon, I am stopped, breathing heavy and watching from behind. It becomes quiet, and as I notice the shh of late-night cars on Van Buren, I wonder what had me running a moment ago. Then it appears from the dark, cautiously, legs wide, watching Mac as it comes close enough to shovel the rabbit into its mouth before it is gone. Mac is glued to the scene, and the thought that he feels connected to this animal brings him closer to me in the one way I do not want.
And then the wolf is back. It is only a gray glow in the moonlight, but belly low it nears the fence again. It pauses and sniffs, then nears more, and I have never seen anything like it, this wolf and my son. Through the fence its nose runs up and down his jeans, and Mac seems almost to press himself against the fence as it sniffs, neck stretched to Mac’s shiny legs. Then it turns away from him, as if to leave, yet pauses. At first I think it is smelling the spot where the rabbit had lain, but the wolf lowers its head, and with a quivering of its hindlegs, sends three great blasts of spray and foamy urine trolloping down Mac.
He turns, mouth open, a mist coming off him beyond smell, and his is the kind of terror I was getting used to on the force. I move to embrace him with everything I’ve got, but when he sees me run at him, he is gone; his legs shudder then burst, a flash of a boy racing down dark paths.
I chase him. I take a breath and run, my keys jangling, my nametag flying off to scramble in the green-black grass. We are running for all we are worth, and soon he is losing me, soon he is only the glint of working shoulder blades and the white arcs of elbows in the moon, and I run. I run until the saliva puddles in my mouth and I am only following his scent. I feel my gun belt take on its familiar cantering rhythm, and I picture him hopping the zoo gate to blur down Van Buren Avenue under dim streetlamps, chasing the traffic, running shirtless past the adult bookstore. I ditch the Maglight and revolver and belt and pull my shirt off until there are only the sounds of my breathing off the asphalt. I round into the wide open of Your Own Backyard, and I know he has gotten away from me, suddenly I’ve chased this kid a thousand times, in an instant I am heading again down old alleys and yards, over hedgerows, across empty causeways, and as a stitch starts in my side all I can do is follow that awful smell on my son and hope it will never leave him because there’s no other way I’ll find him in the dark.
THE DEATH-DEALING CASSINI SATELLITE
Tonight the bus is unusually responsive — brakes crisp, tires gripping — jockeying lane to lane so smoothly your passengers forget they’re moving as they turn to talk over the seats, high heels dangling out into the aisle, teeth bright with vodka and the lemon rinds they pull from clear plastic bags in their purses. Some stand, hanging loosely from overhead handles, wrists looped in white plastic straps, smiling as their bodies lean unnaturally far with the curves. Off-balance, half-falling, this position has its advantages: hips flare and sway behind you, ribs thumb their way through fabric, and this it seems is the view you’ve grown used to, daring you to touch, poised to knock you down.
You don’t even know where you’re driving yet, but through breaks in the trees, you can see red and blues on the Parkway and know traffic cops are working the outflow of an I-High baseball game. The school is not a place you want to be near tonight, especially bumper-to-bumper with old teammates, especially as a nineteen-year-old go-nowhere who drives a charter bus for a cancer victim support group on Thursday nights. So you’re banking a turn onto the Cascade Expressway instead — not an easy feat in a fifty-six-foot BlueLiner — when you catch a glimpse of Mrs. Cassini walking down the long aisle toward you, her figure vibrating in the overhead mirror, and you know you’re in trouble. Her husband built the Cassini Satellite, the one powered by seventy-two pounds of plutonium, so you know what you’re dealing with.