I rolled my eyes. “Tom, I mean Tim, wants to see your golf clubs. Apparently, he’s heard all about them.” My father’s golf clubs were legendary. I smiled my best pissed-off-teen smile, and my father turned back to his group, eager to get the attention away from me. I caught Tim looking longingly at the fridge. “There’s beer on the porch,” I said. It was winter and we usually left the extra beer there to stay cool and leave room for other things.
The night air was cold, but with no wind I found it pleasant, even in my light sweater. I pulled two beers out from the stack of six-packs and Tim opened them with a well-worn bottle opener he had on his key chain.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Sixteen.”
“I thought you were younger.”
I grabbed his face and kissed him. A moment later I asked, “How old do you think I am now?”
“Eighteen,” he said. “Definitely eighteen.”
I began walking to the garage. His eyes were following me. “Do you want to see those golf clubs?” I asked.
We returned to the party forty-five minutes later. My father was annoyed. He’d been waiting to seat everyone for dinner and the servers, hired for the evening, were peering around the doorway to the kitchen with eager, anxious faces. I stood beside him, aware of the smoke that must have been rising off my clothes.
“Where were you?” he whispered.
“Just doing my part for the family business.”
My father looked back to the front door where Tim was rebuttoning his jacket, this time correctly. My mother, who was twirling an empty champagne flute in her fingers, snorted a laugh and then coughed to cover it up. I could see her smiling at me over my father’s shoulder.
The party broke up around midnight. Tim managed some sort of awkward, groping kiss behind someone’s minivan as his parents were leaving. I remember entertaining a fantasy of visiting him at college, but the visit was unlikely, given my age. I stayed out late drinking beers by myself, smoking. My parents had gone to bed, or so I thought. I was just coming inside when I saw my father rushing down the stairs. He was grimacing and he had his hand cupped over his neck. I could see he was bleeding. I knew he was going for the first-aid kit, which we kept in a kitchen cabinet.
“Dad,” I said, alarmed, “what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“But your neck…”
“An accident.”
I raced up the stairs, leaving my father to minister to himself. My mother was sitting at her dresser wrapped in a towel. I watched her reflection in the mirror. She was putting on a face mask that was clay green. Her hair was held back in a headband that made her hair fan out around her face. She looked like a marmoset.
“Mom,” I said cautiously, “what happened?”
“Do I sense disapproval?” she said, uncaring.
“His neck is bleeding.”
“Oh that,” she said. “An accident.”
I stood in the doorway. My father’s profanity echoed faintly from the downstairs bathroom. I shook my head. “What were you fighting about?”
My mother turned and looked at me squarely, her glossy green face and sharp black eyes expressionless and calm. “Katherine, what makes you think we were fighting?”
And then she smiled.
13
I awoke in my car. On the passenger seat were two packs of Raleighs and the Best of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The ghost of a headache still lurked; light bothered me and my mouth was dry. I got out of the car and stretched. The night before, I had taken my keys—which were digging into my leg—out of the front pocket of my jeans and set them on the dash of the truck, something I now regretted. Things had gotten out of hand and I’d left in a hurry. And the keys were forgotten. The Rabbit didn’t lock anymore, so I hadn’t thought about them at all.
I was going to have to go back.
The sun was barely up but already the chug and grind of trucks could be heard from the pumps as well as the steady rise and fall of vehicles soaring by on the highway. I flipped down the sun visor and took a look in the mirror. My hair was matted to my skull, showing that my head came to a bit of a point. I was shockingly white. I looked like I needed a shower and a pint of blood. I lit a cigarette and got up.
The truck was parked out on the cracked concrete, far from the rush of things, but visible from the pumps and the passenger car lot. I began to walk. I was just going to get my keys and leave. What was so difficult about that? I stopped to stub my cigarette onto the concrete, then stalled. From where I was standing, I could see a cowboy boot sticking out in front of the truck, visible just beyond the front left tire.
I squatted and lit another cigarette. The boot was not moving.
Maybe the boot was just a boot. Then I saw the boot begin to jerk a bit, then it was still, then it jerked a couple of times again. I was trying to figure out what a person might do to have that kind of movement—a violent dream? masturbation? epilepsy?—when I saw a small, ill-defined shadow extend beyond the tire. Behind the shadow, pushing it along through the gray morning light, I saw the thin snout and hopelessly delicate paws of a coyote. Our eyes met and she bared her teeth. I smoked. Her jaws were dripping with fresh blood.
I headed down east on Route 70. Indianapolis—according to the atlas—was a three-hour drive. At around ten that morning the highways began to transform from the eternal ribbon to the dip and swoop of broad, urban concrete. I desperately needed a break and decided to take the turnoff for the zoo. If I sat on a bench there, no one would bother me.
An infant giraffe had just been born the week before and there were signs celebrating the new addition, pointing in exuberant zoo ways to the giraffe corral. I had a headache, just a small one, so I bought a cup of searing hot coffee and walked in the white sunlight wherever the arrows pointed. Once my father had brought me to the zoo. We were in Chicago—some odd combination of business trip/mother sees a new specialist/family vacation—where I had spent the days ignored either on the smooth blue vinyl of a hospital couch, or in the waiting room of the doctor, where I remember one reanimated woman coughing and coughing into a roll of paper towels. She did not rip the towels off, but merely crumpled the tar- and fluid-soaked sections into a paper bag, coughing through the whole roll and regarding me with her rheumy eyes all the while. She was challenging me to say something, but I looked away. In an issue of Family Circle I read how to make a cake that looked like a jack-o’-lantern or a ghoul or Dracula’s castle. You could make fangs for your child’s costume out of marshmallows. Mother must have been in the office for close to two hours, because my father showed up—hassled and unamused—to take me to the zoo.
He had his briefcase with him and found a bench to sit on, telling me to meet him in an hour. We would have lunch then. (Actually he looked at his watch and said, “You have sixty minutes. After that, I suppose I will have to feed you.”) I headed for the big cats. There was a long hallway, the cats’ inner sanctum—where they assembled together for meetings, I supposed. They were separated in their rooms and protected by bars that were clear and almost invisible. All of these rooms led to larger pens where the cats, exposed to the elements, could entertain the usual horde of popcorn-chomping children with their antics—leaping off rocks, licking their paws, swimming gracefully through a pool, or lounging in the low branches of a tree. All of these, except for the swimming, I’d seen Claude perform around the yard (Claude was still alive then) but without the menace. The menace intrigued me. I was down the food chain. My big eyes were the eyes of a mouse, or maybe something more exotic. A monkey or a lemur. I was dinner. The cats’ inner sanctum was as a quiet as a church, because the weather was mild and most of the cats were displaying themselves out of doors. I stood in front of the lion house, where a mural of an African plain had been rendered, although none too convincingly. Perhaps they were scared the lions would try to escape into it and bump their heads. I was considering this when I heard a low rumble that sounded like someone running their thumb down the teeth of an enormous comb. I was leaning over the barrier (in my recollection my face was quite close to the bars) when an enormous lion with a head the size of a dishwasher came strolling out to meet me. He smelled of fresh meat and flicked his tail in a casually inquisitive way. I could see, even in his slow gait, the sinking of his massive weight into his muscles, the pull of gravity about his sides, the luxury of his fur. His mane was long, tousled, and wavy. I could see myself reflected in his deep brown eyes—the whole of me—my distorted big head, diminishing pigtails, shiny Mary Janes poking through the bars of the barrier. He took me in without a blink and I stood returning the gesture. And then he roared.