His Illegal Self

11

The mother and the boy were adrift, together in a trailer, with her Harvard book bag hugged between them, and the boy pretended that the prowling storm was just boat spray on Kenoza Lake, in his face and on his feet, and the mother was warm and foggy and he held her tight, his lips against her arm no matter what. He slept and when he woke the light was gray as East River mist and the trailer was fluttering but no longer rocking. Water dripped beside him, pooling in the bright green lake of rug.

How could he have been happy? It was in almost every sense impossible. He had been torn from his soil, thrown through the sky. In spite of which he remembered, vividly, years later-a brief period of deep tranquillity.

The door was in the ceiling, opening to a pale gray sky. He was washed clean of worry, restored.

Then a rooster crowed. Then someone tried to start a chain saw. And then the kitten came, and the kitten was in no way calm.

At first the boy did not even recognize it as a creature with a heart, but something sprung and needled, metal, plastic, a scratchy noise that had to bring itself to him to be identified, a tiny rib cage with drowned rat fur and wild green eyes and it came along the top of the kitchen drawers on which he and Dial were lying and the boy saw all its fright and made a purring noise himself and opened his mouth, O.

Poor kitty. How did you get here?

He took off his T-shirt and wrapped it around the kitty-pink mouth asking, green eyes blaming, sharp teeth threatening revenge.

Dial gave over her cardigan for the cat to travel in, gray with blue stripes, one pocket big enough for a book, the other for a kitten. Thus the boy carried him to the upside-down door with the glass in its bottom panel. See that? Wild trees had been stripped bare, a power line had fallen, showers of yellow sparklers in the rain. The straights not really doing anything but standing with their arms folded against the roaring brown river which was now lapping around the edge of the toilets.

He’s lucky he found us, Dial.

Who?

Buck.

Buck?

Dial never knew this, but the boy nearly named the cat Kipling, for the Cat That Walked by Himself, for Grandma, for the red-and-gold book upstairs, for the smell of paper one hundred years of age. Instead he named him Buck, for the dog in Jack London’s book-He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.

What’s primordial, Dial.

She bit her lip. You crazy little thing, she said. Primordial.

What is it.

Wild things, she had said, the law of the wild.

It’s a good name for him, he said.