Book of Mercy (6 page)
When Wild Things Meet
I
T WAS SO HOT,
Antigone said, the bees came from miles away just to suck the sweat on your arm. Ryder had never heard such a saying before, but he believed it. Every day the July sun beat down on the land in endless waves. The heat felt like a hand on Ryder’s back. It woke him in the morning and followed him into his dreams at night. Tempers flared in Mercy. At the O. Henry Café and Deer Farm, mothers and fathers blew up; the slightest thing—a spilt milkshake, a whining voice, another request for money to feed the deer—could detonate their anger.
Ryder didn’t wipe the sweat from his face. He stood stiffly by the mesh fence. He’d been at the O. Henry Deer Farm for nearly three months, and although he was growing accustomed to working with the deer, he still eyed the creatures with distrust. He knew the moment they sensed him. He saw the change in attitude, how their ears twitched. Their eyes calmly stared him down. He knew the routine. It was the same wherever wild things met—on the streets of New York or on a deer farm in North Carolina. Be cool and be ready to run like hell. He shrugged at the deer. The three older ones ignored him, lowering their heads, nuzzling at the grass. As usual, the two younger deer were curious. They meandered over to the fence, and Ryder involuntarily stepped back.
“They won’t hurt you,” said a voice behind him.
Ryder’s heart jumped, the only sign that he had been caught unaware. It was Star, the girl who lived down the street. She barely came up to his chin and had legs as long and skinny as the two fawns, Noodle and Fancy. When her head moved, the blue and white beads holding her many braids jingled like wind chimes. The deer recognized the sound; they crowded closer. The girl shoved both brown hands through a rectangular opening in the fence, one of the slots used by the tourists to feed the deer. Tourists could buy handfuls of food pellets from a machine by the gate. Even though Star’s hands were empty, each deer nuzzled a pink palm, and then began to lick with long, tickling tongues. Star giggled.
From the beginning, Star’s smile had ambushed Ryder. It was so much like his sister Angela’s. It sliced right through to his heart. He had been eleven when Angela was born, screaming and cramping, already suffering withdrawal from the drugs his mother had passed on in the womb. He knew from the beginning that Angela was his and he was hers. When he walked into the room, it was as if he turned on a light switch in Angela. Angela called for him, not their mother, at night when she woke frightened and tense, and he would hold her, listening to the sirens in the New York night, until she fell back to sleep.
Then one day, while he went out to buy bread and milk, his stoned mother watched three-year-old Angela playfully pull a plastic bag over her head. Angela suffocated. He stepped through the door of the apartment and dropped the bag of groceries. His hysterical mother was just sitting on the floor next to Angela, wringing her hands. He pushed her aside and ripped the plastic from his sister’s frozen face. He tried to give Angela mouth-to-mouth liked he’d seen on TV. Nothing. He must have been doing something wrong. They didn’t have a telephone so he ran across the hall, banging on the neighbor’s door. “Call 9-1-1. My sister,” he shouted.
Ryder blamed himself. He should never have left Angela alone with his mother that day. His self-centered mother, crazy half the time, was unable to take care of herself, much less two children. As the paramedics carried Angela from the rundown apartment, Ryder screamed at his mother. “You fucking bitch, you killed her. You’re no mother; you’re a worthless piece of shit. You don’t care about nothin’ but yourself.”
He raged around the apartment, kicking a chair aside, sweeping dirty dishes off the counter. He sank onto the mattress on the floor where Angela usually slept and held his head. A few moments later, he felt his mother’s presence beside him. He trembled with the need to punch her, as if hitting his mother would ease his own pain. At last, he knew how the Boyfriends felt when they looked at his weak, sniveling mother. He turned away as disgusted with himself as with her. She sobbed and begged him to stay; she needed him, she said, she only had one baby now. She plucked at his arm with desperate fingers. “God, my Angela, what am I gonna do without my Angel Baby? Lord, I need to get happy, need to take my mind off these terrible times. I have the Troubles, Ryder Baby, don’t ya see?” Ryder looked into a face that could be as childlike as Angela’s and as conniving as a junkie’s, and shoved her hand away. That day, he walked out the apartment door and never returned.
“M
AN, THERE’S SOMETHING IN
the air today,” Star said. “The deer can feel it.”
Ryder pointed to the thunderheads gathering in the east. “Storm’s comin’. Don’t take ESP to see that.”
Star touched his arm lightly. Like Angela, Star was a toucher. Ryder knew touchers couldn’t help themselves; they had to handle the world around them. They navigated by grabbing the strings of longitude and latitude and fingering their way to global understanding. They left their fingerprints on everything. Even your soul.
Though Ryder understood touchers, it didn’t make them any less pushy—or terrifying.
“Why are you so grouchy today?” Star asked. “Did you get into another fight with Sam?”
“Antigone said I could eat anything I want.”
“So this is about Froot Loops.”
“You eat a little cereal, and he goes ballistic.” Ryder shrugged then cracked a grin. “There wasn’t that much in the box to begin with.”
Star looked at his pockets. Now how in the hell did she know they were stuffed with cereal? When she first introduced herself to him, she said, “My mama wanted to name me Star, but my daddy said that didn’t sound very African to him. My daddy’s name is Chester, and he’s always wanted an African name. So they called me Kenisha Star Sims. But nobody calls me Kenisha; I’m Star. Like the star that led the wise men.”
Ryder started toward the gate. “You helping today or just here to bug me?” he said. Star followed him. Once through the gate, he secured the door and double-checked the latch. That was the number one rule at the deer farm: make sure the door was latched so no dogs got in. Across a clearing, he saw Antigone starting to heft a bag of grain and hurried to help her.
“I’ll get it,” he said, shouldering her aside. He tossed the bag of feed into the wheelbarrow. In the months he’d been living with Antigone and Sam, his skinny arms had filled out and his muscles had grown hard from lifting feed bags, pushing the wheelbarrow over ruts and through the mud, and eating more food than he could ever imagine. He had even started to like some of the vegetarian crap William dished out over at the O. Henry Café.
He saw Antigone place a hand on her gently rounded stomach. He’d heard her tell Sam that they were through the first trimester. He didn’t know what that meant, except Antigone had stopped eating saltines in bed and upchucking her guts in the bathroom every morning. Which was fine by him. The sound of a heaving woman was not one of his favorite wake-up calls.
They fed the deer a mixture of corn and soybeans. Essentially, it was cow feed, which seemed to Ryder kind of boring. He always thought deer ate trees and stuff. He and Star filled the aluminum water bowls with a garden hose and replaced the big white blocks called salt licks.
The five white-tailed deer ignored them as Antigone and Ryder went about their duties. He knew the deer by name now and how they’d gotten here: Cleo and Lydia had both been shot by hunters. Apple had been run ragged by dogs, barely making it to the farm before birthing the twins, Noodle and Fancy, nearly a year ago. The deer farm was their sanctuary. Inside the eight-foot fence, they were safe from dogs and hunters. Between Antigone and the tourists, they got more attention than most pets. For the most part, Ryder understood the deer. Like Ryder, they had a good setup.
The one creature he didn’t get, and practically nobody else did either, was the cat that had befriended the deer. The calico sauntered among them, as if it were in a still life. It lapped from the deer’s water bowls and slept with them. It ignored the cat food Antigone provided. It chased chipmunks and mice, and, when it caught them, dropped the dead rodent souvenirs at the feet of one of its adopted friends. No one even considered trying to name it.
As the skies darkened, the deer grew increasingly restless. They broke into full runs without warning—and stopped just as suddenly and mysteriously. The cat slid between their frisky hooves like a shadow. The deer played tag and boxed. Ryder stared as two of the adults, each probably tipping the scales at more than a hundred pounds, reared up on hind legs and punched at each other with their front hooves. They pawed the air. Antigone walked up and laid an arm across his shoulder. Startled, Ryder tried to edge away.
“They’re gonna kill each other,” he whispered.
“They’re just having fun.” Antigone smiled. “But don’t
you
get near them when they’re like this.”
Star nodded. “This is deer play, not people play.”
Antigone said, “Those hooves are sharp and strong; they can break your arm or your nose and you won’t know what hit you . . .”
The sound of a slamming gate cracked like a rifle shot in the air. Ryder, Antigone, and Star spun around. The loud clang startled them—and the deer. Sam stomped toward them, head down, obviously in a hurry. “Antigone! I’ve got to run out to Arthur Crump’s site. Transmission problems. Need anything while I’m . . .?”
Antigone took a step toward him, hand held out. “Sam!” she cried, but before she could voice a warning, the herd scattered. All of them except one. One of the boxing deer, still pumped with adrenaline, charged, instead of fleeing—right at the cause of the disturbance. Sam’s head jerked up. He froze. The boxer skidded to a halt before Sam, rose on its hind legs, and attacked. With its front hooves, it beat a tattoo on Sam’s chest, a brief rat-a-tat-tat, a soft drumming by deer standards that left Sam stunned. As suddenly as the attack occurred, it ended. The deer wheeled and fled into the woods.
At first, Sam didn’t move. Then he swallowed and slowly looked down at his chest. Ryder stared at Sam’s chest as well. He didn’t know what he expected to see—perhaps Sam’s heart dangling by an artery from an opened cavity or broken ribs protruding like spears. Instead he saw hoof prints climbing up Sam’s white T-shirt. That’s gonna hurt like hell tomorrow, he thought.
“As I was saying,” Antigone said to Ryder and Star as they approached a dazed Sam, “don’t make any sudden movements or loud noises around the deer. They’re gentle creatures by nature, but they still have that fight or flight instinct. And,” she motioned toward Sam, “you never know which they’ll choose. Always remember that as friendly and loving as they seem, they’re still wild things.”
As Antigone led Sam off in the direction of an ice bag and salve, Ryder cast a wary glance at the herd, which had settled and was grazing as if nothing had happened.
Star’s mother called her in to practice the piano. “You be okay?” the girl asked.
He gave her an exasperated look. Star nodded then walked to the gate. After she was through and the latch secured, she sprinted for home.
The sky rumbled. He turned back to the deer. “I ain’t afraid of you,” he told them.
Fast and Furious
W
HILE
S
AM ICED HIS
chest and Star practiced her piano, Antigone decided to give Ryder another driving lesson in the Mustang on the back roads around Mercy.
“You sure you can leave him?” Ryder asked, trying to get out of the lesson.
“Sam’s a fast healer. He’s already feeling better,” she said, tossing him the keys.
Snatching the keys from the air, he reluctantly settled into the driver’s seat and turned over the engine. Ryder liked to be in control, which was a word that didn’t even enter his mind when he thought of cars and driving. He listened and tried to react as Antigone instructed, but, to someone who had never even ridden a bike, the car seemed way too fast and too large for this narrow country lane. Worse, the Mustang had a mind of its own, like those hotrods from hell in the movies, the kind that sniffs out and corners humans, then runs them over—repeatedly.
“I’m barely touchin’ the gas, and it’s leapin’ out of its skin,” Ryder complained.
“Relax. You’re trying to control too much.”
The Professor used to tell him that, too. He and the Professor had looked out for each other on the streets of New York. They’d been a weird pair: a skittish, angry black kid and a used-up old white guy with a British accent and manners that could charm the hearts of the meanest female volunteers at the soup kitchen. “Why are you always trying to control things?” the Professor had asked Ryder once.
“So they don’t control me,” Ryder told him.
The Professor laughed. “You’ll never be able to control it all.”
“I can try.”
“But, my boy, it takes but a single butterfly to do you in.”
A butterfly? What’s that supposed to mean?
The Professor explained how a butterfly lazily flapping its wings in China could change weather patterns in Canada. It had to do with something called the chaos theory. Chaos, Ryder snorted. That he could understand; chaos was his middle name.
“Ever hear of the chaos theory?” Ryder glanced at Antigone.
