Wild Child and Other Stories

QUESTION 62

She was out in the flower bed, crushing snails — and more on them later — when she happened to glance up into the burning eyes of an optical illusion. Without her glasses and given the looming ob-struction of the brim of her straw gardener’s hat, which kept slipping down the crest of her brow every time she bent forward, she couldn’t be sure what she was seeing at first. She was wearing the hat even though it was overcast because the doctor had removed a basal cell carcinoma from the lobe of her left ear six months ago and she wasn’t taking any chances, not with the hole in the ozone layer and the thinning — or was it thickening? — of the atmosphere. She was wearing sunblock too, though it had been raw and gray all week, grayer than she would have imagined last winter when she was living in Waunakee, Wisconsin, with her sister Anita and thinking of palm trees and a fat glowing postcard sun that melted everything away in its wake. It never rained in Southern California, except that it had been raining all week, all month, and the snails, sliding along on their freeways of slime, loved it. They were everywhere, chewing holes in her nasturtiums, yellowing the tips of her Kaffir lilies and sucking at the bright orange flowers till the delicate petals turned brown and dropped off.

Which was why she was out here this morning, early, before Doug was awake, while the mist clung like gauze to the ground and the L.A. Times landed with a resounding thump in the driveway, down on her hands and knees crushing snails with the garden trowel. She was a vegetarian, like her sister — they’d made a vow when they were in junior high — and she didn’t like to kill anything, not even the flies that gathered in fumbling flotillas on the windowsill, but this was different, this was a kind of war. The snails were an invasive species, the very same escargot people paid fifteen dollars a plate for in the restaurant, brought here at the turn of the last century by a French chef who was a little lax in keeping them in their pens or cages or wherever. They were destroying her plants, so she was destroying them. The tip of the trowel closed over the whorl of the shell and then she pressed down and was rewarded by an audible pop as the shell gave way. She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see the naked dollop of meat trying to follow its probing antennae out of the ruin of its shell, and so she pressed down again until the thing was buried, each snail following the next to its grave.

And then she looked up. And what she saw didn’t compute, not at first. Right there, right behind the wrought-iron fence Doug had put up to keep the deer out of her garden, there seemed to be a big cat watching her, a big striped cat the size of a pony — a tiger, that was what it was, a tiger from India with a head as wide across as the pewter platter she trucked out each Thanksgiving for the veggie cornucopia. She was startled — who wouldn’t be? She’d seen tigers at the zoo, on the Nature Channel, in cages at the circus, but not in her own backyard in Moorpark, California — might as well expect a polar bear in the Bahamas or a warthog at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It took her a minute, staring into the yellow eyes and the blistered snout from thirty feet away, her vision blurred, the hat slipping down over her eyebrows, before she thought to be afraid.

“Doug,” she called in a low voice, as if he could hear her across the yard and through the pink stucco wall of the house, “Doug, Doug.”

She wondered if she should move, come out of her crouch and wave her arms and shout — wasn’t that what you were supposed to do, wave your arms and shout? But the tiger, improbable as it was, didn’t lift its lip in a snarl or leap over the fence or drift away into a corner of her imagination. No, it only twitched its tail and lifted its ears at the sound of her voice.

Two thousand miles away, under a sky of hammered granite, Anita Nordgarden was kicking across the frozen expanse of the drive, two bags of groceries clutched in her arms. She was on the midnight shift at the Page Center for Elder Care, midnight to eight a.m., and she’d had a few drinks after work with some of the other nurses, then sifted through the aisles at the supermarket for the things she’d forgotten she needed. Now, the wind in her face, her fingertips stinging with the cold, she wasn’t thinking very clearly, but if she was thinking anything, it was the fish, Lean Cuisine, pop it in the microwave, wash it down with two glasses of chardonnay and then read till she fell away into the deeps of her midday sleep that was all but indistinguishable from a coma. Or maybe she’d watch a movie, because she was exhausted and a movie required less effort than a book, though she’d seen each of the twenty-three cassettes on the shelf over the TV so many times she could have stopped her ears and cinched a blindfold over her eyes and watched them all the same.

She was just mounting the steps to her trailer when a shadow detached itself from the gloom beneath the doorstep and presented a recognizable face to her. This was One-Eye, the feral torn that lived with his various paramours in the secret fastness beneath the trailer, an animal she neither encouraged nor discouraged. She’d never had a cat. Never especially liked them. And Robert, when he was alive, wouldn’t have an animal in the house. Every once in a while, she’d toss a handful of kibble out in the yard, feeling charitable, but the cat was a bird killer — more than once she’d come home to find feathers scattered round the steps — and she probably would have got rid of it if it weren’t for the mice. Since he’d moved in beneath the trailer she’d stopped finding the slick black mouse pellets in the cupboards and scattered across the kitchen counter and she didn’t like to think of the disease they carried. At any rate, there he was, One-Eye, just staring at her as if she’d somehow intruded on him, and she was about to say something, to raise her voice in a soft, silly half-lubricated falsetto and murmur Kitty, kitty, when the cat suddenly darted back under the steps and she looked up to see a man coming round the corner of the trailer opposite hers.

He walked in a jaunty, almost demented way, closing quickly on her with a big artificial grin on his face — he was selling something, that was it — and before she could get her key in the door he was right there. “Good morning,” he boomed, “lovely morning, huh?

Don’t you love the cold?” He was tall, she saw, nearly as tall as she was perched atop the third step, and he was wearing some sort of animal-skin hat with the ragged frizz of a tail dangling in back — coonskin, she wanted to call it, only she saw right away that this wasn’t raccoon but something else. “Need a hand?”

“No,” she said, and she would have closed out the scene right there, but for the look in his eyes: he wanted something, but he didn’t want it desperately and he wasn’t selling anything, she could see that now. There was a mystery here, and at this hour of the morning, with two Dewar’s and sodas in her and nothing to look forward to but the fish and the chardonnay and the sleep of the dead, she felt the prick of it. “No, thanks,” she added, “I can manage,”

and she was pushing open the door when he made his pitch.

“I was just wondering if you might have a minute to spare—? To talk. Just a minute, that’s all?”

A Jesus freak, she was thinking. All I need. She was halfway through the door, looking back at him, down at him, but he must have been six-five, six-six, and his fixed blue eyes were nearly on a level with hers. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. I work nights and—”

He lifted his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth went up a notch. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said, “I’m not a Bible-thumper or anything like that. I’m not selling anything, nothing at all. I’m your neighbor, is all? Todd Gray? From over on Betts Street?”

The wind was at war with the heater and the soft warm slightly rancid smell of home that emanated from the pillows of the built-in couch and the cheap floorboards and the kitchen counter and the molded plastic strips of the ceiling. She was half-in and half-out and he was standing there on the frozen ground.

“No,” he said, “no,” as if she were protesting, “I just wanted to talk to you about Question 62, that’s all. And I won’t take a minute of your time.”

She was down on her hands and knees for so long her back began to ache — her lower back, right at the base of the spine, where gravity tugged at the bunched muscles there and her stomach sagged beneath them — and she could feel the burden of her torso in her shoulders and wrists. She was there so long the mist began to lift and an oblivious snail slid out from the furls of one of the plants and etched a trail across the knuckles of her right hand. But she didn’t want to move. She couldn’t move. She was beyond fear now and deep into the realm of fascination, of magic and wonder and the compelling strangeness of the moment. A tiger. A tiger in her garden. No one would believe it. No one, not Doug snoring in the bedroom or Anita locked away in her trailer with its frozen skirt of snow and the wind sitting in the north.

The tiger hadn’t moved. It sat there on its haunches like a dog anticipating a treat, braced on its big buff paws, ears erect, tail twitching, watching her. She’d been talking to it in a low voice for some time now, offering up blandishments against the dwindling nugget of her fear, saying, Good boy, good cat, that’s right, yes — and here her voice contracted to a syrupy chirp — he just wants a little love, doesn’t he? A little love, yeah?

The animal made no sign it understood, but it stayed there, pressed to the fence, apparently as fascinated as she, and as the mist clotted round the smooth lanceolate leaves of the oleanders and steamed from the wet shingles of the Hortons’ across the way, she understood that this was somebody’s pet, the ward of some menagerie owner or private collector like that man in the Bronx or Brooklyn or wherever it was with the full-grown tiger in his apartment and the six-foot alligator in the bathtub. Of course it was.

This wasn’t Sumatra or the Sunderbans — aliens hadn’t swooped down overnight in one of their radiant ships and set loose a plague of tigers across the land. The animal was a pet. And it had got loose.

It was probably hungry. Bewildered. Tired. It was probably as surprised to see her in her straw hat and faded green overalls as she was to see it — or him. It was definitely a him — she could see the crease where his equipment lay against his groin and the twin bulbs of his testicles.

But she couldn’t crouch like this forever — her back was killing her. And her wrists. Her wrists had gone numb. Very slowly, as if she were doing yoga to a tape running at half-speed, she lowered her bottom down in the damp soil and felt the pressure ease in her arms, and that was all right, except that her new posture seemed to confound the cat — or excite him.

He moved up off his haunches and slid silkily down the length of the iron fence, then swung round and came back again, the muscles tensed in his shoulders as he rubbed against the bars, and she was sure that he’d been in a cage, that he wanted a cage now — the security of it, the familiarity, probably the only environment he’d ever known — and all she could think of was how to get him in here, inside the fence and maybe into the garage, where she could lock the door and hide him away.

Since Robert died — was killed, that is — she hadn’t had many visitors.

There was Tricia, who lived with her boyfriend three trailers down — she sometimes came in for a cup of tea in the evening when Anita was just waking up and trying to consolidate her physical resources for the shift ahead, but her schedule kept her pretty much to herself. She was only thirty-five, widowed less than a year, the blood still ran in her veins and she liked a good time as much as anybody else. Still, it was hard to find people who wanted to make the rounds of the bars at eight a.m., other than congenital losers and pinch-faced retirees hunched over a double vodka as if it was going to give them back the key to their personalities, and the times she’d tried to go out at night on her days off she’d found herself drifting over her first beer while everybody else got up and danced. And so she invited him in, this man, Todd, and here he was sprawled on the couch in his faded cowboy boots with his legs that ran on forever, and she was offering him some stale Triscuits and a bright orange block of cheddar she’d surreptitiously shaved the mold off of and she was just wondering if he might like a glass of chardonnay.

He’d let his grin flag, but it came back now, a boy’s grin, the grin that had no doubt got him whatever he wanted wherever he went.

He pushed the hat back till the roots of his hair showed in front, squared his shoulders and gathered in his legs. She saw that he was her age, or close enough, and she saw too that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “A little early for me,” he said, and his laugh was genuine. “But if you’re going to have one—”

She was already pouring. “I told you,” she said, “I work nights.”

The wine was one of her few indulgences — it was from a little California vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley. She and her sister Mae had gone wine-tasting when she was visiting over Christmas and she liked the faint dry echo of the chardonnay so much she had two cases shipped back to Wisconsin. Her impulse was to hoard it, but she was feeling generous this morning, expansive in a way that had nothing to do with the two scotches or the way the trailer ticked and hummed over its heating element and a feeble cone of rinsed-out sunshine poked through the blinds. “This is cocktail hour for me,”

she said, handing him the glass, “my chance to kick back before dinner.”

“Right,” he said, “just about the time everybody else is getting to work with crumbs in their lap and a cardboard cup of lukewarm coffee. I used to work nights,” he said. “At a truck stop. I know how it is.”

She’d eased into the chair opposite him, his legs snaking out again as if he couldn’t contain them, boots crossed at the ankles, then uncrossed and crossed again. “So what do you do now?” she asked, wishing she’d had a chance to put on some lipstick, brush her hair. In time, though. In time she would. Especially if he stayed for a second glass.

His eyes, which had never strayed from hers since he hunched through the door, slipped away and then came back again. He shrugged. “This and that.”

She had nothing to say to this and they were silent a moment as they sipped their wine and listened to the wind run at the trailer.

“You like it?” she said finally.

“Hm?”

“The wine.”

“Oh, sure, yeah. I’m not much of a connoisseur, I’d say … but yeah, definitely.”

“It’s a California wine. My sister lives out there. Got it right from the winery itself.”

“Nice,” he said, and she could see he was just being polite.

Probably the next thing he would say was that he was more of a beer man himself.

She wanted to say more, wanted to tell him about the vineyard, the neat braided rows of grapevines curling round the hills and arcing down into the little valleys like the whorls of a shell, about the tasting room and the feel of the sun on her face as she and Mae sat outside at a redwood table and toasted each other and the power of healing and the beginning of a new life for them both, but she sensed he wouldn’t be interested. So she leaned in then, elbows propped on the knees of the pale blue cotton scrubs she wore to work every night, his legs splayed out in front of her as if he’d been reclining there all his life, and said, “So what is this question you wanted to ask me about, anyway?”

The more she talked, the more the tiger seemed to settle down.

Before long it stopped pacing, leaned into the rails of the fence and let its body melt away till it was lying there in the dirt and devil grass as if it had somehow found the one place in the world that suited it best. There was the sound of the birds — a jay calling harshly from the next yard over, a songbird swapping improvisations with its mate — and the soughing rumble of a car going up the street behind the house, and then she could hear the tiger’s breathing as clearly as if she were sitting in the living room listening to it come through Doug’s stereo speakers. It wasn’t purring, not exactly, but there was a glottal sound there, deep and throaty, and after a moment she realized the animal was asleep and that what she was hearing was a kind of snore, a sucking wheeze, in and out, in and out. She was amazed. Struck dumb. How many people had heard a tiger snore?

How many people in the world, in the history of the world, let alone Moorpark? What she felt then was grace, a grace that descended on her from the gray roof of the morning, a sense of privilege and intimacy no one on earth was feeling. This animal didn’t belong to her, she knew that — it had an owner somewhere and he would be out looking for it, the police would be here soon, dogs, trackers, guns — but the moment did.

“Well, let me put it this way,” he was saying, “I see you got some ferals living under your trailer …”

“Ferals?” At first she thought he’d meant ferrets and she gave his hat a closer scrutiny. Was that what that was, ferret fur?

“Cats. Stray cats.”

He was studying her intently, challenging her with his eyes. She shrugged. “Three or four of them. They come and go.”

“You’re not feeding them, are you?”

“Not really.”

“Good,” he said, and then repeated himself with a kind of religious fervor, his voice echoing off the molded plastic of the ceiling. She saw that his glass was empty, clutched in one oversized hand and balanced delicately over the crotch of his jeans. “Because they’re bird killers, you know. Big time. You ever notice feathers scattered around?”

“Not really.” This was the moment to look at her own empty glass and hold it up to the light. “But hey, I’m going to have another — help me sleep. How about you?”

He waved his hand in a vague way, which she took to mean yes, and she lifted the bottle from the coffee table and held it aloft a moment so that the pale light through the window caught the label, then leaned forward, way out over the gulf of his parted thighs, to pour for him. He didn’t thank her. Didn’t even seem to notice. “I like birds,” he said. “I love birds. I’ve been a member of the Audubon Society since I was in sixth grade, did you know that?”

She didn’t know that, how could she? — she’d just met him ten minutes ago. But she’d always liked tall men and she liked the way he’d settled in, liked the way things were going. His brow furrowed, his eyes leapt out at her: he was a preacher, after all. So what did she do? She poured herself a glass of wine and shrugged again. Let him talk.

“Anyway,” he said, and he drank off half the glass in a gulp,

“anyway — this is good stuff, I see what you mean. But the cats. Did you know there are something like two million stray cats in this state alone and that they’re responsible for killing between forty-seven million to a hundred and thirty-nine million native songbirds a year, depending on the estimate? A hundred and thirty-nine million.” He drew up his legs, the boots sliding away from her and clapping lightly together as he sat up erect in the chair. “Now that’s outrageous, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” she said, sipping California, tasting the sun on her tongue, the earth, the trees, the vines that wove the hills into a big green fruit-hung tapestry. Robert had been five-eleven, an inch taller than she, and that was fine, that was all right, because she’d had her fill of blind dates and friends of friends who came up to her clavicle, but she’d always wondered what it would be like to date a man who made her feel short. And vulnerable. Somebody who could pull her head to his chest and just squeeze till she felt the weight go out of her legs.

“So that’s why I’m here,” he said, studying the pale gold of the wine in the clear crystal of the glass, before tilting his head to throw back what remained. “That’s why I’m going house to house to drum up support for Question 62—for the birds. To save the birds.”

She felt as if she were drifting, uncontained, floating right up and out through the ceiling of the trailer to blow off on the wind as if she were a bird herself — two scotches and two glasses of wine on a mostly empty stomach, the Lean Cuisine Salmon Gratin with Lemon

& Dill sitting frozen on the counter. Still, she had the presence of mind to lean back in the chair, let out a deep breath and focus a smile on him. “All right,” she said, “you got me — what’s Question 62?”

The answer consumed the next ten minutes, during which she put on her listening expression and poured them each another half glass of wine and the presence of the sun grew firmer as it sliced the blinds into plainly delineated stripes that began ever so slowly to creep across the carpet. Question 62, he told her, was coming up for a vote in seventy-two counties on the twelfth of April and it was as simple as this: should cats be listed as an unprotected species like skunks and gophers and other nuisance animals? They were coldly efficient predators and they were interfering with the ecosystem.

They were killing off birds and outcompeting native animals like hawks, owls and foxes for prey, and the long and short of it was that any cat found roaming without a collar could be hunted without a license or season or bag limit.

“Hunted?” she said. “You mean, with a gun? Like deer or something?”

“Like gophers,” he said. “Like rats.” His eyes were fierce and he leaned over his empty glass as if he were about to snatch it up and grind it between his teeth. He was sweating, a translucent runnel of fluid leaching out of his hairline and into the baffle of his right eyebrow; in a single motion he shrugged out of his parka and pulled off the hat to reveal a full head of russet hair streaked blond at the tips. He was staring right into her.

“I don’t like guns,” she said.

“Guns’re a fact of life.”

“My husband was killed by a gun.” As she said it, a flat statement of fact, she saw Robert lying in the dirt not fifty feet from where they were sitting now and she heard the sirens and the gunshots, and the face of Tim Palko from the trailer across the way came back to her, Tim Palko, drunk for a week after he lost his job and gone crazy with his deer rifle till the SWAT team closed in and he put the barrel of it in his own mouth and jerked the trigger one last time. But she’d seen death — she saw it every week at the Page Center — and when she looked out the window of the trailer after the first shot thumped through the afternoon like the beat of a bass drum that never reverberated, she could see from the way Robert was lying there that it had come for him and come instantly. Mae had said, How could you be sure? but she had two eyes and she knew absolutely and incontrovertibly, and that knowledge, cold as it was, grim as it was, saved her. If I’d run out there, Mae, she told her, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.

The man — Todd — dropped his eyes, made a noise in the back of his throat. They were silent a moment, just listening to the wind, and then the clouds closed in and the sun failed and the room grew a shade darker, two shades, and she reached for the pull on the lamp.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It must be hard.”

She didn’t answer. She studied his face, his hands, the nervous bounce of his right heel. “What I was thinking,” she said finally, “is maybe opening another bottle. lust one more glass. What do you say?”

He looked up at her with that grin, the grin resurrected in the space of a heartbeat to make everything all right again. “I don’t know,” he sighed, and he was watching her now, watching her as intently as he’d been a moment ago when he was delivering his speech, “but if I have another glass I’m going to want to lay down.

How about you? You feel like laying down?”

For a long while Mae crouched there in the wet earth, toying with the idea of backing noiselessly across the lawn so she could slip next door to the Kaprielians’ and see if she could maybe borrow or purchase some meat — steak, rump roast, whatever they had — and she’d pay them later because this was an emergency and she couldn’t talk about it now. Meat, that was what she needed. Any kind of meat.

She had a fantasy of dropping wet slabs of it across the lawn in a discontinuous path that snaked up the gravel walk and through the open door of the garage, the big cat lured inside where it would settle down to sleep over a full belly between the dryer and the Toyota. But no. She hardly knew the Kaprielians. And what she did know of them she didn’t like, the husband a big-bellied inimical presence bent perpetually over the hood of his hot rod or whatever it was and the wife dressed like some sort of hooker even in the morning when she went out to the driveway to retrieve the newspaper …

She didn’t believe in meat and neither did Doug. That was one of the things that had attracted her to him, one of the things they had in common, though there were other things — mountains of them, replete with ridges and declensions and towering heights — in which they were polar opposites. But Doug had worked two summers in a chicken plant in Tennessee, snatching the chickens up out of their cages to suspend them on a cable by their clamped feet so they could proceed to the pluckers and gutters, and he’d vowed never again to touch a piece of meat as long as he lived. He’d strung up tens of thousands of bewildered birds, their wings flapping in confusion amidst the chicken screech and the chicken stink, one after another heading down the line to have their heads removed and their innards ripped out. What did they ever do to us, he said, his face twisted with the memory of it, to deserve that?

She was still down on her knees, her eyes fixed on the swell of the tiger’s ribs as they rose and fell in the decelerating rhythm of sleep, thinking maybe she could give it eggs, a stainless steel pan with raw egg and then a line of individual eggs just tapped enough to show the yolk, when the back door of the neighbors’ house jerked open with a pneumatic wheeze and there was the Kaprielian woman, in her bathrobe and heels no less, letting the two yapping Pomeranians out into the yard. That was all it took to break the spell. The door wheezed shut, the dogs blew across the grass like down in a stiff wind, and the tiger was gone.

Later, after the dogs had got through sniffing and yapping and the neighborhood woke to the building clangor of a Saturday morning in March — doors slamming, voices rising and falling and engines of every conceivable bore and displacement screaming to life — she sat with Doug at the kitchen table and stared out into the gray vacancy of the backyard, where it had begun to rain. Doug was giving the paper his long squint. He’d lit a cigarette and he alternated puffs with delicate abbreviated sips of his second cup of overheated coffee. He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt stained with the redwood paint he’d used on the picnic table. At first he hadn’t believed her. “What,” he’d said, “it’s not April Fools’, not yet.”

But then, there it was in the paper — a picture of a leathery white-haired man, a tracker, bent over a pugmark in the mud near a dude ranch in Simi Valley, and then they turned on the TV and the reporter was standing there in the backwash of the helicopter’s blades, warning people to stay inside and keep their pets with them because some sort of exotic cat had apparently got loose and could be a potential danger — and they’d both gone out back and studied the ground along the fence in silence.

There was nothing there, no sign, nothing. Just dirt. The first few spatters of rain feathered the brim of her hat, struck at her shoulders. For a moment she thought she could smell it, the odor released in a sprinkle of rain, the smell of litter, fur, the wild, but then she couldn’t be sure.

Doug was staring at her, his eyes pale and wondering. “You really saw it?” he said. “Really? You’re not shitting me, right?” In the next moment he went down on his heels and thrust his hand through the slats of the fence to pat the ground as if it were the striped hide of the animal itself.

She looked down at the top of his head, the hair matted and poorly-cut, his bald spot spinning in a whorl of its own, galactic, a whole cosmos there. She didn’t bother to answer.

Todd barely fit the bed, which occupied its own snug little cubbyhole off the wall of the master bedroom, and twice, in his passion, he sat up abruptly and cracked his head on the low-slung ceiling, and she had to laugh, lying there naked beneath him, because he was so earnest, so eager in his application. But he was tender too, and patient with her — it had been a long time, too long, and she’d almost forgotten what a man could make her feel like, a man other than Robert, a stranger with a new body, new hands and tongue and groin. New rhythm. New smell. Robert had smelled of his mother, of the sad damp house he’d grown up in, carpet slippers and menthol, the old dog and the mold under the kitchen sink and the saccharine spice of the aftershave he tried to cover it all up with. Todd’s smell was different, fresher somehow, as if he’d just come back from a roll in the snow, but there was something else too, something darker and denser, and she held him a long while, her face pressed to the back of his head, before she understood what it was: the lingering scent of the fur hat that was lying now on the couch in the other room. She thought of that and then she was gone, deep in her coma, the whole world closing down on her cubbyhole in the wall.

He left her a note on the kitchen table. She saw it there when she got up for work, the windows dark and the heater ticking away like a Geiger counter. His hand was free-flowing, shapely, and that pleased her, the care that went into it, what it said about him as an individual. The words were pretty special too. He said that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met in his life and that he was going to take her out to breakfast in the morning, make it a date, if that was all right with her, and he signed his full name, Todd Jefferson Gray, and wrote out his address and phone number beneath it.

Next morning, when her shift was over, she walked across the snow-scabbed lot to her car, her spirits rising with every step. She never doubted he’d be there, not for a minute, but she couldn’t help craning her neck to sweep the lot, expecting him to emerge from one car or another, tall and quick-striding, his smile widening. As it was, she didn’t notice him until she was nearly on him — he wasn’t in a car; he didn’t have a car. He was standing just beyond the front bumper of her Saturn with a solemn look on his face, rooted to the ground like one of the trees that rose up behind him in a black tangle. When she was right there, right at the door of the car with the keys in her hand and he still hadn’t moved, she felt confused.

“Todd?” she heard herself say. “Is everything all right?”

He smiled then and swept the fur hat from his head with a mock bow. “I believe we have a date, don’t we?” he said, and without waiting for an answer he moved forward to hold the door for her before sliding into the passenger’s seat.

At the diner — already busy with the Sunday-morning church crowd — they ordered two large orange juices, which Todd discreetly reinforced with vodka from the bottle he produced from the inside pocket of his parka. She drained the first one all the way to the bottom before she lit her first cigarette of the day and ordered another. Only then did she look at the menu.

“Go on,” Todd told her, “it’s on me. Order anything you want.

Have a steak, anything. Steak and eggs—”

She was feeling the vodka, the way it seemed to contract her insides and take the lingering chill out of her fingers and toes. She took another sip of her screwdriver, threw back her head to shake out her hair. “I’m a vegetarian,” she said.

It took him a minute. She watched his eyes narrow, as if he were trying for a better perspective. The waitress stalked by, decaf in one hand, regular in the other, giving them a look. “So what does that mean?”

“It means I don’t eat any meat.”

“Dairy?”

She shrugged. “Not much. I take a calcium supplement.”

A change seemed to come over him. Where a moment ago he’d been loose and supple, sunk into the cushion of the fake-leather banquette as if his spine had gone to sleep, now suddenly he went rigid. “What,” he said, his voice saturated with irony, “you feel sorry for the cows, is that it? Because they have to have their poor little teats pulled? Well, I’ll tell you, I was raised on a dairy farm and if you didn’t milk those cows every morning they’d explode — and that’s cruelty, if you want to know.”

She didn’t say anything, didn’t really want to get into it. Whether she drank milk or ate sloppy joes and pig’s feet was nobody’s business but hers and it was a decision she’d made so long ago it was just part of her now, like the shape of her eyes and her hair color. She picked up the menu, just to do something.

“So what,” he said. “I’m just wasting my time here, is that it?

You’re one of these save the animals people? You hate hunting, isn’t that right?” He drew in a breath. “And hunters.”

“I don’t know,” she said, and she felt a spark of irritation rising in her, “what difference does it make?”

She saw him clench his fist, and he almost brought it down on the table before he caught himself. He was struggling to control his voice: “What difference does it make? Have you been listening to me?

I’ve had death threats over Question 62—from your cat lovers, the pacifists themselves.”

“Right,” she said. “Like the cats under my trailer are some big threat, aren’t they? Invasive species, right? Well, we’re an invasive species. Mrs. Merker I was telling you about, the one that gets up twenty times a night to find the bathroom and twenty times a night asks me who I am and what I think I’m doing in her house? She’s part of the problem, isn’t she? Why not hunt old ladies too?”

His eyes jumped round the room before they came back to her, exasperated eyes, irritated, angry. “I don’t know. I’m not into that. I mean, that’s people.”

She told herself to shut it down, to pick up the menu and order something innocuous — waffles, with fake maple syrup that spared even the maple trees — but she couldn’t. Maybe it was the drinks, maybe that was it. “But don’t people kill birds? Habitat destruction and whatever, mini-malls, diesel engines and what, plastics. Plastics kill birds, don’t they?”

“Don’t get crazy on me. Because that’s nuts. Just nuts.”

“Just asking.”

“Just asking?” Now the fist did come down on the table, a single propulsive thump that set the silverware rattling and heads turning.

“We’re talking death threats and you think this is some kind of game?” He was on his feet suddenly, the tallest man in the world, the jacket riding up over his belt, his face soaring, all that displacement of air and light. He bent for his hat, then straightened up again, his face contorted. “Some date,” he said, and then he was gone.

The night of the tiger, a night that collapsed across the hills like a wet sack under the weight of yet another storm, Mae kept the television on late, hoping for news. Earlier, she and Doug had thought of going out to dinner and then maybe a movie, but with the rain showing no sign of letting up Doug didn’t think he wanted to risk it and so she’d got creative with some leftover marinara sauce, zucchini and rice and they’d wound up watching an old pastel movie on the classic channel. The movie — they missed the first ten minutes and she never did catch the title — featured Gene Kelly in a sailor suit. Doug, who was working on the last beer of his six-pack, said it should have been Singin’ in the Rain.

That was funny, and though she was distracted — had been distracted all day — she laughed. There was a silence then and they both listened to the rain hammering at the roof — it was so loud, so persistent, that for a moment it drowned out the dialogue on the TV.

“I guess this is it,” Doug said, leaning back in his recliner with a sigh, “—the monsoon. The real deal, huh?” He gestured to the ceiling with the can of beer.

“Yeah,” she said, watching the bright figures glide across the screen, “but I just hope it doesn’t float us away. You think the car’s going to be all right in the driveway?”

He gave her a look of irritation. “It’s only rain.”

“It seems so strange, though, because there’s no thunder, no lightning. It just keeps coming as if somebody’d turned on a big spigot in the sky.” She made a face. “I don’t know. I don’t like it. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it — even the word, monsoon. It’s so bizarre, like something out of some jungle someplace.”

He just shrugged. They’d looked to his career and chosen California — Moorpark — over Atlanta, because, and they were both in absolute agreement here, they didn’t want to live in the South.

And while she loved the idea of year-round gardening — flowers in February and trees that never lost their leaves — she was still feeling her way around the way the seasons seemed to stall and the earth hardened to clay under the unblinking summer sun till it was like brick and nothing would grow along the fence but devil grass and tumbleweeds. Tumbleweeds. She might as well have been in the Wild West.

She’d had two beers herself and her attention was drifting — she couldn’t really focus on the movie, all that movement, singing, dancing, the earnest plot, as if any of this meant anything — and when Doug got up without a word and steadied himself against the arm of the chair before moving off toward the bedroom, she picked up the remote and began flicking through the channels. She was looking for something, anything that might bring her back to what she’d felt that morning, on her knees in the garden with the mist rising round her. The tiger was out there, in the black of the night, the rain steaming round it. That was a thing she could hold on to, an image that grew inside her like something that had been planted there. And they wouldn’t be able to track it, she realized, not now, not in this. After a while she muted the sound and just sat there listening to the rain, hoping it would never stop.

A week went by. The temperature took a nosedive and then it began to snow, off and on, until Saturday, when Anita came out of work to the smell of diesel and the flashing lights of the snowplow and had to struggle through a foot of fresh snow to her car. Her mood was desolate. Mrs. Merker had torn off her Depends and squatted to pee right in front of the nurses’ station and Mr. Pohnert (“Call me Alvin”) kept pressing his buzzer every five minutes to complain that his feet were cold despite the fact that both his legs had been removed five years ago due to complications from diabetes. And there were the usual aggravations, the moans and whimpers and the gagging and retching and people crying out in the dark — the strangeness of the place, insulated and overheated, with its ticking machines and dying bodies and her at the center of it. And now this.

The sky was dark and roiled, the snow flung on the wind in sharp stinging pellets. It took her fifteen minutes to get her car out. And she drove home like a zombie, both hands clenching the wheel even as the tires floated and shimmied over the patches of ice.

There were tracks punched in the snow around her doorstep, cat tracks, amidst a scattering of blue feathers tipped with black. And a flyer, creased down the middle and shoved into the crack of the door. NO ON 62, it said, SAVE OUR PETS. She didn’t have the heart to open a bottle of chardonnay — that she would save for brighter times — but she did make herself a cup of tea and spike it with a shot of Dewar’s while she thought about what she wanted to eat, soup maybe, just a can of Chunky Vegetable and some wheat toast to dip in it. She had the TV on and her feet up before she noticed the blinking light on her message machine. There were two messages.

The first was from Mae—“Call me,” delivered in a tragic voice — and the second, the one she’d been waiting all week for, was from Todd.

He was sorry about the blowup, but he’d been under a lot of pressure lately and he hoped they could get together again — soon, real soon — despite their differences, because they really did have a lot in common and she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met and he’d really like to make it up to her. If she would let him. Please.

She was wondering about that — what exactly they had in common aside from two semi-drunken go-arounds on her bed and the fact that they were both tall and both lived in Waunakee — when the phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring, thinking it was him. “Hello?” she whispered.

“Anita?” It was Mae. Her voice was cored out and empty, beyond tragic, beyond tears. “Oh, Anita, Anita.” She broke off, gathered herself. “They shot the tiger.”

“Who? What tiger?”

“It didn’t even have claws. This beautiful animal, somebody’s pet, and it couldn’t have—”

“Couldn’t have what? What tiger? What are you talking about?”

But the conversation ended there. The connection was broken, either on Mae’s end or hers — she couldn’t be sure until she tried to dial her sister and the phone gave back nothing but static. Somebody had skidded into a telephone pole, that was it, and she wondered how much longer the lights would be on — that would be next, no power — and she got up out of the chair to pull open the tab on the top of the soup can, disgorge the contents into a ceramic bowl and flag the mircrowave while she could. She punched in the three digits and was rewarded by the mechanical roar of the thing starting up, the bowl rotating inside and the visual display of the numbers counting down, 3:30, 3:29, 3:28, until suddenly, in the space of the next second, the microwave choked off and the TV died and the fluorescent strip under the cabinet flickered once and buried its light in a dark tube.

For a long while she sat there in the shadows, sipping her tea, which had already crossed the threshold from hot to lukewarm, and then she got up and dumped a handful of ice in it and filled it to the rim with Dewar’s. She was sipping her drink and thinking vaguely about food, a sandwich, she’d make a sandwich when she felt like it, cheese, lettuce, wheat bread — that she could do with or without power — when a sound from beneath the trailer brought her back, a scrabbling there, as of an animal, on its four paws, making a quiet meal.

She’d have to sacrifice the cats, she could see that now, because as soon as they hooked the phones back up she was going to call Todd. She wished he were here now, wished they were in bed together, under the quilt, drinking chardonnay and listening to the snow sift down on the aluminum roof of the trailer. She didn’t care about the cats. They were nothing to her. And she wanted to please him, she did, but she couldn’t help wondering — and she’d ask him too, she’d put it to him — What had Question 61 been, or Question 50, Question 29? Pave over the land? Pollute the streams? Kill the buffalo? Or what about Question 1, for that matter. Question 1—and she pictured it now, written on a slate in chalk and carried from village to village in a time of want and weather just like this, the snow coming down and people peering out from behind heavy wooden doors with a look of suspicion and irritation — Question 1

must have been something really momentous, the kick start of the whole program of the Department of Natural Resources. And what could it have been? Cut down the trees, flay the hides, pull the fish from the rivers? Or no, she thought, tipping back the mug, it would have been even more basic than that: Kill off the Indians. Yeah. Sure.

That must have been it: Kill off the Indians.

She got up then and made herself a sandwich, then poured herself another little drop of scotch and took the plate and the mug with her to the cubbyhole of her bed, where she sat cross-legged against the pillow that still smelled of him and chewed and drank and listened to the cold message of the snow.