“Christ,” Marty’s father yells. “Leave the damn things be. It’s Saturday. The Rebs are playing.” The woman who first answered the door slides a blue-screened TV out the kitchen pass-through, and Marty’s father turns all the knobs on the intercom, shouting “Game time” into every room.
Because of all the Wild Kingdom episodes I talk about, my mom tells Ted I’m a big nature fan. One Sunday morning at the SkyLounge, he brings me the gift of a “Safariland” snow globe he says is from Africa, though there’s something like Safariland in Florida, too. The globe features plastic cheetahs, giraffes, and gazelles in brown grasslands, racing full hilt into a surprise blizzard. It is Hecho en Mexico.
So I’m suspicious of the wolves, which are at once completely unreal in this Vegas backyard, yet so obviously dangerous I feel it in my toes. To a lesser degree, I feel the same way about a family barbecue, which is something I’ve never been to.
Somehow satisfied with the wolves at hand, Marty stares up at the imposing rock formations above. Out in the bright light of day, the scars on Marty’s face pronounce themselves with the clear slickness of sexual skin. I follow his gaze up to the communications tower, and the hard throb of the red light on top hypnotizes me. It’s the red light I look for with my current meter all day at Futron, and this red seems right, the way, after looking into a million circuits, you can just feel when one’s going to go reject on you.
Above the tower, a jet splits the October sky, wavering and adjusting on approach to LAS. Its nose floats much lower than a DC-9. This is a Lockheed L-1011.
I know the outlines of airplanes because, at sixteen, I spend a weekend making marker drawings of jetliners and quizzing my mother as we sit on a gold-comforted hotel bed in Michigan. When she gets all the flash cards right, I know she will pass her United test in the morning and move to Detroit the following week. The L-1011 is an easy one: its wingtips curve up at the ends, so from below they look cut off.
Ted tells me he can fly a jet, if push comes to shove, if that’s what it comes down to. I don’t have much to say to that. The statement somehow implies my father doesn’t have what it takes, when it comes down to it, which is why he may or may not be dead. I tell Ted there’s a god of flying. Rickimus maybe. Rick something or other. Something-something-rus, for sure.
Marty’s father tries a softer tone. He is standing at the grill with a long fork, and the heat from the coals is enough to distort the edges of things, to make the brown of the roof and the blue of the sky trade places for an instant. “Come on, Marty,” he says, “bring your friends over for some grub. The Runnin’ Rebs are playing. They’re your favorite. They’re playing Arizona. Remember that big game against Arizona a few years back? You loved that game.”
“We’re just going to look at the caiman, Dad.”
“Why can’t you leave that gator alone?”
“It’s called a caiman, Dad.”
With a fork in one hand and the platter in other, Marty’s father lifts his arms in a shrug of indifference. “Whatever. I don’t see the attraction. You tell me the appeal.”
He throws the meat on a grill so hot the steaks bounce; they squeak and whine. The wolves go crazy over this. They too let out short, high moans, like children.
The sounds remind me of a nature program I see one night that sticks in my head for reasons that will remain unclear until I eventually meet Ted. On the show, a man walks into brown savanna chewgrass to reconstruct a takedown. From the dirt, he collects whitened ribs and hocks and knuckles. He examines them, noting teeth and claw marks. A horn, he decides, is an important clue. A soundtrack of feasting hyenas plays as he points at trees and hills, deciding how many predators, direction of attack, strategy, and carcass distribution. Then this man looks into the camera. There’s no rest for the hungry, he says. So come, let’s see what the lions are up to, and we watch his Jeep drive off into the plain, the bumper folding down tall grass that springs up behind him, and he is gone.
Ted tells me he has my father’s binoculars, which are all that’s left. He’s been meaning to give them to me.
Marty nods a forget-him look toward his father and leads us to the caiman. Jimbo’s eyes light up at the prospect, and we walk, hands in pockets, in our natural order — indifferent, disruptive, and doubtful — along pool decking bordered by chain link and wolves that cut their faces trying to take our ankles.
In the other corner of the yard is the most ridiculous thing I have seen. Another chain-link fence, complete with posts and gate, stands a foot and a half tall. I mean, it doesn’t even come to your knees.
“You’re kidding me with this,” I say.
“It’s all you need,” Marty says. “Caimans can’t climb.”
“This is such bullshit,” I tell him and make a show of stepping over the fence, rather than through the tiny gate. Jimbo follows my lead. We cross tan gravel that crunches under our boots, stop in front of a lone blue kiddie pool. There is no shade, just brown and blue.
“There it is,” Marty says.
“Did I fuckin’ tell you, or what,” Jimbo says.
Inside the pool floats a four-foot reptile, motionless, with a thin, tooth-rimmed snout. It can’t weigh thirty-five pounds. Its eyes are cataract-black, and it doesn’t even seem to breathe.
In life, some things will come clear to you. There are the knowns — the exact video-feed frequency that unscrambles pornography, for instance, the foot-pounds of lift inside the hot, distorted edge of air cutting over a 737 wing, the speed at which your mother endlessly circles the city in her gold Cadillac after your father leaves, or the way young dictators are known to buy stewardesses drinks in the lounge of the Cayman Royale.
And then there are the others, the things that aren’t so easy. There’s the boxy loop of youth, a decade that leaves your ears ringing with television and loneliness. There is the way Tammy’s body becomes one of the “urecoverables” beneath the D.C. ice. Then there’s an overbright morning at the SkyLounge when Ted mentions that, technically, I might have a younger brother in Africa. Eventually comes a moment you accept the not knowing, like a first step into the blue, when you must trust the shifty cliff gods to see you down.
I stand and stare at the reptile. Reflected in the water is the tower above, the deep ruby strobe seeming to beat from the caiman itself. “That’s totally fake,” I say.
“Come on, look at it,” Jimbo says. “There it is.”
“Fumble,” Marty’s father calls out to us. “Check it out. Rebs’re first and goal.” He is sitting in a folding chair strung with nylon webbing, beer and fork in the same hand, but he’s watching more of us than the game.
The wolves still sprint along the perimeter of their run, frothing and clipping, their legs tripping them into balls that tumble, roll, and emerge as charging blurs.
“The Rebs are going to reverse. Hundred bucks says it. Remember when I taught you the reverse? You weren’t even ten.”
“Sure, Dad.”
“The Rebs are gonna go for it. Bring your friends over and check out the game,” he says, and when we don’t respond, he stands up. “I’m telling you to leave that stupid thing alone.”
Marty and his father have a moment when they eye each other across the pool. Jimbo leans in close to me, his mouth hovering by my ear. “I dare you to touch it,” he whispers. Signals I don’t understand pass between father and son. Marty’s father then heads for us, walking barefoot and stiff-legged around the pool with his beer, throwing dirty looks at the ceaseless wolves. He, too, steps right over the fence and walks gingerly, arms out, over the rocks. He comes to stand beside me at the edge of the kiddie pool, so that he has to yell past me and Jimbo at his son. “What’s the fucking deal with this thing,” he says. “Show me the appeal. It doesn’t do anything. It just sits there.”