The Orphan (3 page)

The rind of the old moon slips down the wide sky. It is warm and pleasant to sit in the grass behind the milk house sipping at my third bottle of beer. They are all mine, all mine, the nest of brown, elongated egg-like bottles of beer I am holding between my furry thighs. Fortunately I am a slow drinker, for it takes only two bottles to disable my judgment and make me the silliest creature in all nature. I laugh and roll on the wet grass for the pleasure of feeling the blood rush tingling from one side of my drunken body to the other. I roll over and it rushes back, numb to tingly, tingly to numb. I roll and scratch up the grass and laugh until I am foaming at the mouth.

The Nordmeyers have two yard dogs, one a large female Springer Spaniel named Josie, the other a witless German Shepherd named Biff. Josie leaves me alone, crawling under the brooder house whenever I appear. Biff has never learned anything in his life. He is so stupid that he swallows the cockleburrs he pulls out of his fur, unable to think of anything else to do with something that is in his mouth. He hears something (me!) behind the milk house, and while Josie is retiring to her hiding place, I hear him tiptoeing up to surprise me. I lie flat in the grass, my body spreadeagled like a bear rug, my jaws yawned open. Bill springs. from behind the milk house, stiff legged and masculine, expecting to find a neighbor dog. He has no nose, really. I look up at him from behind my gaping muzzle, trying not to laugh.

Biff stands there, astonished at the bear rug in the grass. He approaches inch by inch, stretches his neck out, jerking back at an imaginary sound, stretching again to sniff my outstretched paw. Suddenly I snap my jaws shut loudly and grab him by the throat. He cannot make a sound and coils up like a salamander trying to get away.

“Nice Biff,” I say, holding him by the neck, not choking him much. “Wanna play, Biff?” I roll over on my back and hold him with all four paws, just tight enough so he can’t get away. The minute I let go of his throat he begins to squeal. I have never heard a dog squeal before. It is an interesting sound. I set him on his feet with his back to the milk house wall. He stands hunched up, a dog hunchback. Very funny. I reach out to pat his head, and he crumples as if I had hit him. I get down, butt in the air in dog play position. He stares at me from his crumpled shape. I get up and hop about him like a big demented bunny. His eyes roll, and he looks as if he wants to become part of the cement wall.

Then it seeps through my foggy brain. I really do want to play with him, roll on the ground with another creature and bite in fun and rough each other up. Could I shift into a dog shape? The thought unsettles me. I giggle. Biff groans. The two dogs are always playing, running in circles, rolling on the grass, chasing the bull Humphrey out in the back pasture, going halves on a rabbit.

I get down on all fours. “Now watch this, Biff,” I say playfully. I concentrate as much as the beer will allow, on Josie. JOSIE, I think, trying to pull my mind into a doggy point. JOSIE! Something happens. Biff jerks back, bumping his head against the wall. I am
almost
Josie, but my head and shoulders remain me. Must look awful. I try again. I concentrate. Shift. This time I’ve got it. I look back over my shoulder: dog from ears to black spotted tail. I wag the tail. Biff is terrified, looking at my legs. Oh cripe. I am a large edition of Josie but I have four of Little Robert’s legs, pink toes and all. As I close my eyes to concentrate again, Biff makes a break for the corncrib where he has a hidey hole. I follow him slowly, shift back to my own form and peer under the building at the drooling, quivering dog.

“Just a minute, dammit,” I say to Biff. “I’m doing this so we can have some fun.”

It is becoming difficult to hold an image. All this concentration with my weakened mind is tough to do. I manage another shift. No. Wrong again. I hear Biff scrabbling back further under the crib, banging his head and elbows on the floor joists. I am dog on one end, nothing on the other. I look like a horrible, dog faced caterpillar. Biff begins to howl a deathly, hollow sound from under the crib. Maybe I can’t be a dog. It is like squeezing a balloon. One part gets squeezed into the right shape, but another part pooches out wrong, so to speak. I let it go and shift back to my natural form.

“Ooooeet?”

Damned smartass owl. I catch his vibrations from the first branch of the walnut tree next to the garden fence. I slip into the shadow of the fence, drift across and under him while he swivels his head around and asks again, “Oooooeet?” I leap.

“Gotcha!” I bite into him so fast he doesn’t have time to blink. I do not notice the porch door opening a crack. The owl tastes of mouse, and I drop to the ground to rub my muzzle in the grass. Thunder crashes from the back porch, and the tree splatters bark just over my head.

Shotgun!

Running low and fast, sober as a weasel in a henhouse, I zip along the fence and over the creek embankment. Damn! Whenever I eat a bird that farmer sneaks up on me. Raising my head slightly in the weeds I feel about for the man with the gun. Still behind the back door, he is shielded by the screen. I can barely detect him. The door slides open, and Martin edges out mto the shadow by the rain barrel. He walks into the faint moonlight as far as the garden gate calling Biff and Josie, neither of whom appear. He disappears back onto the porch, and I hear the click of the hook on the screen. He fades from my perception.

What has he seen? I mentally lay out his line of sight from the back door to where I stood to eat the owl. He couldn’t have seen much in this light, a shadow standing on its hind legs against a tree, running along a grassy fence row. But I am forgetting Robert. Martin might easily check his room before returning to bed. I take a step up the bank when another sound comes from the porch. Crafty hunter! He is still there, invisible and undetectable behind the screen. I freeze, turning up my hearing to the limit, seeking through the metal screen with my spatial sense. There he is, lowering the gun, walking back into the kitchen. Gone. No lamps are lighted. Maybe that means he will not check Robert’s room, but I do not take the chance.

I slip out of the weeds, follow every shadow over to the peach tree beneath Robert’s window, carefully inch my way up through the thick branches until I can reach up and grab his windowsill. With one claw I flip the sash up hard so it jams sideways near the top. In the next instant I hear Martin’s footsteps coming along the hallway, I swing up through the window and drop to the floor of the room. The instant I hit the floor, I shift, so that Little Robert seemed to have just turned from the open window as Martin’s stocky shadow appeared in his doorway.

“What was it, Daddy?” I congratulate Robert on the “Daddy.” Every distraction helps, for I do not know yet what the farmer has seen.

“Sorry to wake you up, Robert,” the farmer said, walking softly to the naked boy who stood by the open window. “My goodness, you always take your nightshirt off. You’ll catch your death. Must have been a stray dog out there rummaging around. I had to take a shot at him. They’re a bad lot, you know.” He carried Robert back to bed.

“Now you stay under the covers. I’ll shut your window.”

From the bed, Robert could dimly see Martin’s heavy shadow struggling with the window. It was jammed tight.

“How’d you get your window in this kind of fix?”

He grunted and strained and finally with a heave pulled the sash out of the frame altogether with a ripping, splintering sound that brought Aunt Cat striding into the room, a tall, flat shadow, angry and holding her robe tightly around her.

“I swear, Martin. What
are
you doing? First it’s shoot ’em up at midnight, and now what’ve you done? Look at that. My Lord! Ripped his window right out. What in the world?”

The ensuing explanations and arguments were more than enough to take Martin’s mind off of what he might have seen, and Robert dropped into sleep as suddenly and softly as an owl would take a mouse.

Now that Robert is no longer locked in at night, it is no trouble for me to slip away for a good rabbit chase in the open fields or some sneaking around creek and hedge rows for more sporting game like foxes, mink, or even wild dogs. One moonless night near the end of May when the seedlings are just beginning to give the fields a tamed and ordered look, I slip out as usual, leave Robert’s nightshirt in the barn, and relax. It is always a relief to shift back after a long time in changed form. The world springs back into its real shape, night sounds take on their old meanings, my spatial sense fills me with confidence as I perceive each living shape and movement around me, and I feel my eyes dilating with predatory efficiency. My claws are sound in their sheaths, and my hide prickles with joy under the fur. I am fast and gleeful, and nothing can stand in my way or escape my grasp. I feel like singing, or killing something, or running a fox to ground and telling her my secrets while I hold her neck tightly, staring into her bulging red eyes, then setting her back on her feet and tweaking her tail to make her run. How complete is the freedom of the natural body and its perceptions, its beautiful muscles that coil and spring, leap and bunch, and hold the bones in their trance of motion and speed.

I am trailing a female fox, sneaking through the hedges, crossing the creek twice, until I am almost to the railroad bridge south of the town. The fox scent crosses the creek again and seems to head toward the darkness under the bridge. But then it is blotted out by the odor of people, very dirty people. I crouch in the weeds along the creek to scan the area under the arch of the bridge. The smell comes from there. Human excrement, old and new, alcohol, canned food spoiled and fresh, dirty skin and clothing. The mounds are human forms rolled up in rags to keep warm. People asleep under the bridge. Tramps. They walk the highways and railroad tracks, have no place to stay, no way to dig burrows for themselves, and they sleep in places like this. There is a camp for these people in the town. I have heard the farmer and his wife talking about it. It is called a “Roosevelt Roost,” a name I do not understand. I wonder why these people are here in the dirt when they could be roosting with Roosevelt in a dry building? Perhaps they are outcasts.

I step warily through the weeds, keeping low, wondering at such filth. How can they stand to sleep so near their own excrement? Even dogs ... but suddenly, not able to sense much because of the powerful smell that is blocking out part of my mind, I step down on a human hand.

“Sonuvabitch!”

I leap sideways and drop into the weeds where I land, startled half out of my skin. It is always humans who remind me of my limitations. They are always surprising me in surprising ways. I flatten, hoping the person will go back to sleep, but the man has gotten up on his hands and knees and is feeling around in the grass near me. I will have to get away without hurting him, and I cannot shift into Robert’s form, for it would be too dangerous to him. His hand blunders into my fur.

“What the goddamhell?”

I sense his every movement, the direction of his gaze in the darkness. I know he cannot see much, and I wait for the moment when he is off guard for an instant. It comes.

“Hey you gays. There’s something like a ...”

At the moment his head turns slightly to look in the direction of the sleeping forms under the bridge, I throw my weight up and against his belly, digging in my back claws, and push him over backwards into the creek. I leap the creek as his form hits the water under me, and I am a hundred yards up the railroad ditch in the tall weeds before he can get out of the water. I lie quiet, controlling my panting, listening to the man’s curses and screams as he wakes the others under the bridge.

I creep back along the opposite side of the railroad tracks to the other side of the bridge opening. The shapes are sitting up now, three, no, four of them. They are passing cigarettes around, the glowing ends momentarily lighting up the faces, bearded and stubbly, one old man, three younger ones, but all with a common haggard look, as if they might be from the same sickly litter.

“Dumb shit,” the oldest one says, coughing heavily. “Had you a dream about guys in fur suits and fell in the crick. Too much wine.”

“It wasn’t no dream. It ’uz a big dog, maybe.”

“You was dreamin’ about that little gal that give us the bakery bread,” says the skinny younger one.

“I wasn’t never dreamin’ and I ain’t drunk. It was somebody, maybe a bear,” the one they call Gus says. He is wrapped in an old overcoat, shivering.

They all laugh.

“Gus got pushed in the crick by a bear.”

The hilarity does not last. Their bodies have a rank, sick smell. They are not healthy like the farmer and his wife. The oldest one is sick with something that wastes his body. I smell it, but have no experience of what it might be. After a bit the oldest one lies down again and the short, silent man leans back in the dirt and pulls a wide brimmed hat over his eyes. Gus and the skinny one sit up finishing a cigarette, staring blindly out into the dark weeds where I am crouched looking back at them.

“Rusty says we ought to get on down to Chi tomorrow,” the skinny one says.

“Yeah, I reckon,” says the other one. “And workin’ the stem in this town ain’t bad. I made forty cents off one old lady yesterday.” He draws on the cigarette so that his face emerges from its silhouette. He is narrow faced, like a chicken, hardly any forehead, eyes set back almost to the side of his face. He looks pinched.

“Tommy!” says the voice of the one called Rusty who has his hat over his face. “Getcher ass over here. I’m cold.”

Tommy says nothing, gets up and goes over to lie close beside Rusty.

Gus stands up, holding the overcoat around him. His hair almost touches the arched concrete ceiling. He is a big, wide shouldered man with a large head, but when he walks back to his nest in the weeds, his shoulders fall into a stoop and he seems smaller.

Being close to them, listening to their words, smelling their rancid odors has a strange effect. I have the feeling that if I shifted, I would not be Robert, but someone diiferent. It is an unsettling feeling, and I turn away finally from the little camp under the railway bridge and lope back to the farm without hunting further.