Then he dropped Zippo’s hand and stared straight ahead.
It was like being at a Natural History Museum. Like looking through glass at a diorama full of stuffed dead things.
There was the section of fence, first of all, trampled into the ground. Half a dozen police knelt in a ring around the perimeter of the schoolyard with their rifles aimed through the links in the remaining chicken wire. The lights from their cruisers flung splashes of red, like paint ball blotches, across their otherwise colorless faces and the dead grass and the hunkered, gray brick of the school building thirty yards away and the whimpering, teary-eyed children clutching each other by the swing sets. Between the children and the school, their shaggy flanks heaving as they panted and chuffed and lowered their horny heads, four full-grown buffalo bumped around and against each other and expelled geysers of breath into the freezing air.
“Oh, no,” Ethel said. “Oh, boys.”
How long, Daniel wondered, had this scene been frozen like this? He could see what had happened. The recess bell ringing. The sound startling the buffalo, who’d rumbled right through the fence, smack in between this last group of straggling kids and the safety of their classroom.
On the blacktop, Daniel saw two teachers and a towering African American man in pinstripes gesturing furiously at each other, the kids, the cops. All along the fence, walkie-talkies spit static and snatches of hard, unintelligible instruction.
“Harry?” the African American man called abruptly, and both Ethel’s and Zippo’s heads jerked toward the buffalo. The same buffalo, Daniel noticed, the one farthest to the right with his nose in the grass and the broken tip of his horn jutting toward them like a shiv.
But the man was talking to one of the kids. And the kid was lifting his red hood off his ears. He was maybe eight, blond-haired, with chipmunk cheeks that would have amused either of Daniel’s aunts for weeks on end if they could have gotten their pinching fingers on them. He wiped a hand across his tear-streaked face and waited.
“Just walk this way, son,” the pinstripe man was saying. “Around the fence there. Come to us. Harry, lead them this way. All of you, now. Come on.”
None of the children moved. In the center of the yard, the buffalo stamped. One of them knocked horns with its closest neighbor, though the gesture looked accidental to Daniel. More like two old men bumping into one another with walkers than rutting.
Then the kid in the hood moved. The moment he did, the buffalo with the broken horn looked up, snorted loudly, and raked its foot along the grass. Instantly, rifles leapt to shoulders as the cops locked in, and the buffalo froze, sweeping its gaze once across the whole assembled mass before him. It chuffed again, pawed more frantically, and tore a huge hunk of dirt out of the lawn.
“Damn it,” spat a nearby radio.
Harry — the kid, not the animal — burst into fresh tears. Half a dozen safety catches popped free on half a dozen guns. Daniel was so busy watching the police that he didn’t notice Aunt Zippo moving until she was halfway across the yard.
“Jesus,” a policeman yelled. “Someone grab her!”
But Aunt Zippo had already reached the herd, and as Daniel’s mouth dropped open, she disappeared amongst them.
Even the children went silent. Around the old woman, the buffalo began to pant and paw nervously. One of them bumped her with its flank, and Daniel saw her stagger and get bumped by another and almost go down amidst their stamping feet. The one with the pointed half-horn had moved into the circle, now, and it was poking at Aunt Zippo with its head lowered and its front foot working furiously at the grass.
For one more moment, the unreality held. Daniel stared at the animals snorting around his aunt, alternately ignoring her and then brandishing horns and banging themselves against her. The eeriest thing wasn’t their presence. It was theirphysicality. Their breath and their scraped, hairy sides and their deep-set, black-brown eyes and the way their skin seemed draped over their skulls rather than attached to it, as though they were already skeleton and hide, and there was something else, something not-buffalo, underneath there.
His aunts’ faces, Daniel realized, looked the same way. Everyone’s did. His father’s. His wife’s. Hell, even his own face. Our features little more than cloaks life shrugs on while it camps inside us.
Somewhere to his right, a walkie-talkie crackled. Rifles shifted, held. Ethel was just staring, her hands over her mouth. Daniel threw his arm around her shoulder, squeezed once.
“I’ll get her,” he said.
“Oh, God,” said his aunt.
Then he was through the fence, flinging up his hand, screaming, “Wait! Don’t shoot!”
“Hold fire!” someone shouted.
Two guns exploded. Daniel ducked, whirled, waved a frantic hand, and broke into a run as the kids screeched and bolted for the blacktop. Over the tops of the nearest buffalo, Daniel could see his Aunt’s orange shawl, the back of her head with its thinning, blue-white hair like a cloud coming apart. The head disappeared as his aunt went down.
“No!” Daniel screamed, and the buffalo broke as one into a plunging, sideways dash toward the far end of the schoolyard, away from the children and the blacktop and the mass of muzzles and threatening faces.
All of them, that is, except the one with the horn. Harry. He had slid, with surprising grace, onto his front knees. Aunt Zippo was kneeling beside him. The buffalo seemed to hover there a moment, and then slipped the rest of the way to the grass.
Aunt Zippo laid, both her hands on the animal’s throat, under its mane. Its great black hooves had splayed to either side of her, and blood bubbled from the holes in its gut and over Zippo’s gloves.
“Ssh,” she was saying, in that hypnotic, even cadence she seemed to have been born with, or maybe just learned through too much practice. So many years of practice. “Ssh, Harry.” She never looked up, not once. She just kept whispering, over and over, until the buffalo died.
* * * *
It took hours, after that, for the truck to come, and for the animal wranglers to wrestle the surviving bison into it. By the time Daniel and his aunts got back to Ethel’s, it was too late to drive home, and he was too shaken, anyway. Ethel ordered pineapple pizza, which Daniel barely touched but which his aunts devoured. Ethel burst into tears once, and Zippo sat beside her and said, “I know. I know.”
“How many times?” Ethel sobbed, swiping at her cheeks and smearing pizza grease there.
Producing yet another of her magic tissues, Zippo wiped the grease away. “There doesn’t seem to be a limit.”
“You know, I still miss him the most. Harry.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t love him the most. He pretty much slept and worked and built Herm’s trains with him and wouldn’t let us eat donuts enough. But I miss him the most.”
“He was the first,” Zippo said.
“Don’t eat that last pineapple,” Ethel said, and snatched the final pizza slice from the box. Abruptly, she looked up at Daniel, held the slice toward him. “Unless you want it, honey.”
Daniel shook his head, closed his eyes, saw skeleton-flashes of white light, like the projected shadows of a CAT-scan. When he opened his eyes, his aunts were holding hands.
Zippo went home, and Ethel set him up in her son Herm’s old room with the train bedspread still draped over the bed. Daniel read a Dick Francis novel until well after midnight because he didn’t think he could sleep, nodded off with the book on his chest, and woke up weeping.