That roar sounded like the ocean breaking in a storm and I’m sure it moved every hair on my head and dried out my corneas. That roar put me in a warm cloud of half-digested meat and sticky fangs. That roar was a biblical wind, a calculated reminder of God’s omnipotence and my futility. That roar seemed to last for ten minutes until I forgot where I was and then remembered, only to find myself running as fast as I could away from it, past a nanny who was clucking into a stroller, past a little boy scraping gum from his shoe, past a group of muttering Japanese consulting a map, and into the all-cleansing sunlight.
Here, at the Indianapolis Zoo, I watched the baby giraffe dancing first to the right and then forward, then rushing back to its mother, as if on bamboo stilts. My bench was shaded by a tree and the cold air, through my nostrils, was soothing my headache. The coffee was almost gone. A group of schoolchildren in uniform were lined in two perfect queues waiting to be marched somewhere. An indignant African bird called loudly from a netted enclosure, furious to find itself in the Midwest. My left leg was falling asleep and the cold metal of the bench had worked its way through my jeans, chilling my rear. I thought, perhaps, I should look for the wolves.
The wolf pen was a ten-minute walk from the giraffes. I suppose wolves make giraffes nervous and the distance was a form of courtesy. The wolf pen was a depressing affair. Perhaps because wolves were native to Indiana, the zoo did not feel the need to comfort them with a jutting ledge of rock or aggressive foliage. It was enough to just mark out a square of the fertile, unremarkable Indiana soil and to say that this was home. As if in response to this, a large male wolf lay panting in the sunshine, overcome with ennui. His side collapsed and expanded, collapsed and expanded, with surprising drama and as he breathed I could see his impressive fangs, which struck me as right out of Red Riding Hood, although other than that, he looked just like a large, lanky dog. There was a reek to the pen—urine, musk, despair—that quickly made me low. I was once again confronted with the horror of being imprisoned. I was jittery, too much coffee and too little sleep, but I decided to free that wolf. There was no one around and I thought if I could only slip behind the building, I could make my way in. There had to be some sort of opening for feeding the beasts. I would let him out and soon, loping through the valleys and piny forests, his howl would call the moon into the sky. His brethren would join him in a lupine circle and a chorus of throaty song would shiver the pine needles and cause the coursing spring-melt streams to glitter magically in their beds…
All this was the result of a willful, aggressive, romantic denial. It wasn’t even spring, only fall. And, most importantly, I was in the heart of a large city. My freed wolf would probably knock down some garbage cans, go after a cat, and then get hit by a truck while trying to navigate the freeway. But this was far from my mind when I found the door to the feeding area ajar and stepped inside. Inside was dark. I stood still, waiting for my eyes to adjust, overwhelmed by the stink and somewhere, to my left, alerted by the shuffling of something nearby. The light was coming from down the room, which was slowly revealing itself to be a narrow hallway flanked by doors on either side. Something was scraping its nails along the floor. I thought it might be a rat, but it was too large. Also, the gait was awkward, unbalanced. I froze in place, my hands flexing nervously at my sides. And then I felt a cold, wet nub press into the back of my hand.
“Aahh,” I screamed. Someone flipped a light switch and soon the shivering neon bars lit up the whole room. A zookeeper was running toward me.
“Shut the door. He’ll get out,” he yelled.
“What?” I said. I saw a young wolf sitting beside me; it must have bumped my hand with its nose. I went quickly to the door and shut it.
“What are you doing in here anyway?” The zookeeper was about forty, overweight, with an odd fringe of soft red hair that made him look tonsured.
“I was looking for the restroom,” I said. I looked down at the young wolf, who was still sitting. Then he got up and began to limp over and I saw that the wolf only had one hind leg. He could still move quite quickly and hopped over with agility and speed. “Is he friendly?” I asked.
“That depends on your definition of friendly,” said the zookeeper.
The wolf’s hind leg seemed to grow right out the middle of his hindquarters, but at closer inspection, I could see the nub of a missing leg and the twisted angle that the other leg had grown in to accommodate the wolf’s weight.
“My definition of friendly is that he won’t bite,” I said.
“I think you’re safe,” said the zookeeper. He was full of bravado and had a superior, nerdy manner. I guessed that he had no friends and probably frequented Renaissance festivals. “His name’s Leto.”
“That’s an interesting name,” I said.
The zookeeper gave me a condescending harrumph. “It’s from Dune.”
“Yes?”
“Haven’t you read it?”
“Dune, no.” In my mind, I had already changed the wolf’s name to Quequeg.
“Dune is the greatest book ever written.”
“Have you read every book?”
“I’ve read enough.”
I smiled coldly and returned my gaze to the tripedal wolf. “What happened to him?”
“Actually, a tiger got him.”
“A tiger? How did that happen?”
“We had the cubs out for some school thing and Leto got away. We found him near the big cats. He’d already lost the leg.”
I looked into his gorgeous gray eyes. Something yellow glittered there, a memory of evil. “Why isn’t he with the other wolves?”
“The public doesn’t want to see a three-legged wolf. And the other wolves probably won’t like him at this point. I’ve kept him back here with me for the last three months, but he’s getting too big…”
“Are you going to adopt him?”
“Leto? He looks cute, but I know too much about wolves to keep him in my house. Besides, the zoo would never allow that.”
“So what will happen to him?”
“I’m going to have to put him down.” Yeah, this guy was a real man, unsentimental, tough.
“You can’t do that.” I had the urge to pat the wolf, but something made me think better of it.
“You better go,” said the zookeeper. “The public aren’t allowed back here, and this chitchat is nice and all, but I have to feed the hyenas.”
“All right.”
“I hope you don’t mind showing yourself out,” he said, too busy (or at least he wanted me to believe so) to bother with me. “And don’t let Leto out.”