“I think it’s fake.”
Drinking his beer, he glares at me like I’m an idiot. “What’s the point? What’s the big deal? You got a car and a girl and a family. Your favorite game’s on. There’s steaks and beer. You do fucking remember what steak tastes like, don’t you?” He stops and turns toward the wolves. “Shut up,” he yells.
“Dad, I’m not hearing you now, not when you’re like this.”
I stare at the caiman that hovers in the water, unblinking, legs out, heartbeat red.
“I’m with him,” I say. “What’s the point?”
“There is no point,” Marty’s father says and kicks the side of the kiddie pool. The sides yaw and wow with the waves, and the caiman, frozen, rides up and down. “See?” he says. “It doesn’t do anything.”
There is no motion from the caiman, nothing.
We look from the pool to Marty’s father as he knocks back the last of his beer. “Watch this,” he says and leans out to drop the can on the caiman’s back. There is only a hollow sound when it bounces off. “Boy, what a barrel of fun this thing is. I’m glad it takes up a third of our yard. I’m glad I can’t sleep for those fucking wolves, too.”
“That’s it. We’re leaving,” Marty says, as if this isn’t really our plan.
I look at Jimbo, who shrugs. “It’s fake anyway,” I tell him.
Without taking his eyes off us, Marty’s father shouts “shut up” over his shoulder. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To Fly Away.”
“You’re going to Fly Away?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the rest of the family will just pal around with the gator then.” He leans out, dips his toes in the pool, and splashes water on it. “I know, ‘It’s a caiman.’”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Marty says.
Marty’s father puts a hand on my shoulder for balance. With this touch, things suddenly become real for me, and my eyes shift from the hand that grips me to the bare leg below it, swinging back into the blue of the kiddie pool.
This is how a toe comes off. When it happens, it is simple: a sound seems to come before the water even moves, the cracking of a wet sheet maybe, and the caiman rises in motion, turning, too fast to take in. The light changes on the water, there is the popping sound of a hock joint, and I feel fingers grip deep into my shoulder. Then Marty’s father turns from us.
We all just stand there as he hobbles across the gravel, and we watch what is to be one, slow lap around the pool, alone. As he moves past the pool’s shallow steps, the blood starts in earnest, and when he rounds the deep end, we can see his big toe is hanging by a flap.
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.