The Wild (11 page)

"This side of the street, halfway up the block."

"At least it's not over on goddamn Mercer." He glared at Cindy. "I think you'd better look over your liability policy, girl."

Cindy went gray with rage. She detested sexual diminutives.

"Oh, now, John, you won't be doing anything like that. Come on, children, let's help Daddy get over to the emergency room."

Bob saw Cindy's hands on the baked beans. The O'Neills began to leave. Bob cringed. He knew exactly what was about to happen. The O'Neills went into the foyer, began waiting for the elevator. At that moment Cindy snapped. "You can take your damned baked beans and shove them you know where,
boy
!" With that she poured them over O'Neill. They were followed by the soup and the broccoli and then the door was slammed on the howling, food-covered O'Neills.

"You're harboring a rabid dog, you've assaulted me," O'Neill roared. "There will be revenge, girlie, there will be sweet revenge." Then, in a lower tone: "Stop eating that broccoli, you fool."

"Sorry, Dad."

The elevator took the O'Neills away. "Well, I guess I can write Jodie off as a friend," Kevin commented absently. He turned up
Mystery,
which he had been watching with the volume off.

"Oh, hell, now I've got the whole damn foyer to clean up."

Monica put her arm around Cindy. "I've got some nice Melozine in my purse."

"Tranquilizers give me anxiety attacks. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop."

The two women cleaned up the mess, assisted by Kevin. Bob could easily have helped them by eating the beans off the floor, but he was damned if he was going to act like an animal. He went over, lay down on the couch, and watched
Mystery
with his muzzle on his paws.

Monica came and sat beside him. "I want to talk to you alone for a moment, Bob. I'm assuming that you can understand what I'm saying. Your actions tonight make it clear that your mind is unchanged. You're as odd as ever. First, I have some sort of an idea of what you have done. It's called hypnagogic transformation. You, of course, have accomplished a miraculous hypnagogic transformation. Among American Indians it is called shape-shifting and at best involves a certain amount of straightforward contortion. What you have done staggers the scientific mind. I always knew that you were a repressed, undeveloped genius of some sort. That you would choose to express your genius in this particular direction is naturally a surprise. But I must say something to you. Now listen to me. You are causing your family great suffering by what you have done. You must shift back. You must leave this utterly fantastic contortion and return to the human form. You can do it, you're in complete control of the situation. You and I know this, even though you yourself may not be willing to admit it. Bob, I beg of you, for the sake of a marvelous woman and a lovely little boy, return to them. Accept reality. You are a failure in life. A complete failure. But you are also a wonderful, surprisingly charismatic man. Your wife loves you to distraction. And that little boy—he adores his father. Please, for them, come back to us."

Outside the wind blew, sending a rattle of leaves against the window. Autumn was here. Time for the running of the deer, time for the gathering of nuts and the making of nests. The wind was wild, the wind was rich, the wind went where it went. Bob could see the high stars changing in their courses, could hear a rat scuttling along the roof across the street, could hear pigeons fluttering in their sleep. The owl that had been here earlier was now gone, but bats squeaked in the sky, dashing about after the last flies of summer.

He could not tell Monica how mistaken she was. His present form was as real and as immutable as his former one had been. Whatever had affected him had come and gone its merry way, leaving him as he now was.

"Am I reaching you, Bob?"

He tapped.

"Wait until you see what this absurd avoidance response is going to do to your family. You've sent a wonderful woman and a beautiful child to hell. So be it. I'm off to the hospital, where I intend to spend the rest of the night doing research. If I can find a way to force you out of this maneuver of yours, I'll do it. But I doubt that there's going to be a thing in the literature."

As she left, Bob disconsolately watched Lord Peter Wimsey dance through the intricacies of some mystery he couldn't identify.

"I'm going to bed, Mom."

"Good night, son. Maybe things will be better tomorrow."

"Tomorrow is another day, eh. That might not be entirely correct. Kafka—"

"Shut up about Kafka! I'm sick of hearing about Kafka."

"We're living the
Metamorphosis."

"I don't care if we're living the
Niebelungenlied,
no more Kafka. At the moment I find it almost invincibly depressing. Now go to bed, I want to be alone with the remains of your father."

With a murmured "okay, Mom," he left the room. Soon the "Blue Danube" was drifting out his door.

"Turn it off! I never want to hear that again!" She sobbed, then rushed after him. "Oh, honey, I'm sorry. Please forgive your mother. It's been a pretty dismal day."

Bob could not cry. In fact, great emotion made him droop, loll his tongue, and stare. He watched as they prepared for bed.

"Can I stay with you, Mom?"

"Sure."

They climbed in bed together. They were beginning to respond to him just exactly as if he were a real dog. In a word, he was being ignored.

Cindy lay still, her mouth slightly open, Kevin in the crook of her arm.

Then the doorbell started. It was insistent, buzzing again and again.

Bob could do nothing but wait and watch. Cindy opened her eyes, gave a grunt of confusion, then turned over. The buzzer started up once more. She sat up in bed. "My God." With a hustle of covers she arose and went to the intercom. "Who? The
police
! Of course." She buzzed them in.

Bob paced, panting, which reduced his body heat—cold air across the tongue, a good, new sensation.

Then they were there, a whole foyer full of them, men smelling of cigarettes and oiled steel, of leather and sweat, tough men. "We got a dog complaint, ma'am."

"That bastard."

"He had twelve stitches. He lost a nerve in his foot. It'll be months before he walks. The dog's gotta go in for observation."

"No! That's completely impossible."

"Ma'am, the ASPCA truck is downstairs. It'll just be a week, he'll be treated well. You can visit him. It's no big deal."

"They're afraid of rabies?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Doesn't the rabies test involve dissecting the head of the animal?"

Bob shrank back into the coat closet, staring wildly.

"Ma'am, it's a matter of observation first. It won't come to no tests."

"But if it does?"

"Well, the test terminates the life of the animal. But if he might have rabies—"

"He doesn't have it! The worst he has is a slight case of the sniffles!"

"Well, it's put him in a kind of a bad mood."

"You can't take him. I'll have my vet look at him."

"No, ma'am. There's been a complaint filed. We have to take the dog."

"Where's your warrant? You can't even come in here without a warrant!"

"I hate these pet schticks. We don't need a warrant, ma'am. I'm going to tell the ASPCA guys to come up." He spoke into a handheld radio. The other cops fanned out into the living room, their bulky bodies filling it, casting black shadows from the single light that was on, the lamp that hung over the dining table.

Bob was so horrified that he couldn't move. He stood watching Cindy lose her battle with the police. She literally wrung her hands as she talked, and then three more men came in, dressed in khaki overalls, carrying a large cage between them.

"Come on, boy," one of them said, opening his face at Bob in a most insincere approximation of a grin.

The smells, though, told him a great deal. When the man spoke to him, an odor of tooth decay and old bacon grease came across the air. Bob took a step forward and it blossomed with acid, a stench like boiling wax and onions. The man was afraid of him—terrified. And full of hate.

Bob could not go with these people. They would kill him, he knew it certainly.

"What the fuck," the man burst out. "This ain't a dog!" His voice was high, his odor grainy with fear. "You got a fuckin' wolf here."

One of the other men in khaki spoke up. "Why didn't you say this was a wolf, lady?"

"I—I—"

"People think these things are pets. They're crazy. This is a dangerous animal, my men aren't going near it."

Two of the policemen had their hands on their pistols.

"Go back to the truck," the flushed man said to one of the others. "Get the dart gun."

Cindy gave a little cry. A flash of panic made Bob growl. It was short and sharp, almost a bark.

The head cop took off his cap. "Lady, why are you keeping a wolf? Don't you know this is illegal?"

"He's a—he's just a big husky."

"Back out," the chief ASPCA man said, "these things can cut you to ribbons in a second. Where the fuck's Louie with that dart gun?" He grabbed one of the radios. "Louie, for God's sake, its hackles are up!"

The police had their pistols out now, all of them. Behind the clutch of blue and khaki the elevator door opened. Bob bolted, racing down the hall toward the bedroom.

"I'm calling my lawyer," Cindy shouted. Who? Bob wondered. Stanford Shadbold, whom they hadn't paid in a year?

"Okay, guys, break out the net. Block the corridor. I'm going in." As Cindy started her frantic phone calling Bob raced back and forth from bathroom to closet. The smells of fear and rage coming from the men drove him to panic, that and the knowledge of what was coming. From the bed there came a groan, then young Kevin was sitting up. He stared, stupefied, as a man in khaki, wearing a fencing mask and heavy quilting on his chest, arms and legs, advanced. In his hands was a neat plastic gun. Bob tried to rush past him at the last moment, his heart full of hopelessness, his body still determined to escape.

There was an awful, burning pain in his breast. He heard himself screaming, a doggy wail.

"Dad, Dad!"

"Shut up, kid. Okay, guys, he's going down."

The fire spread, an agony that turned him to wood. It hurt but he could neither move nor cry out. He lay on his side, stiff, while his wife yammered at answering services and the ASPCA team gathered him up in a stout nylon net.

They took Bob's burning, paralyzed body down the hall. His eyes had blurred but he could still smell the horrible odors of the men, the faint smells of other animals on the netting, the rancid butter of Cindy and Kevin's terror.

Shrieks followed him down the hall, their razor agony penetrating even the tranquilizer. He could not even struggle to help Cindy, he could do nothing but listen to her at the far edge of panic, making a sound beyond grief.

"What about the Bill of Rights?" Kevin screamed, running along behind his father, wearing nothing but a pair of underpants. "What about due process? You can't just wrap my dad up in a net! You can't do it, this is America."

One of the policemen enclosed Kevin in a hug. "Gonna be okay, son. You wait and see."

"Don't you do that! Don't you grab my boy like that!"

Then Bob was in the elevator. The door rattled closed. Cindy's bellowing and Kevin's rising, frantic voice receded.

The world receded. There remained only the burning pain at the center of his chest, where the needle had been embedded. There was that, there was the blur of lights as the net was carried through the lobby. Then the back of the truck, thick with the scent of animal despair, a urinous, rotted stench. One of the men played a harmonica, some Spanish tune. Bob drifted helplessly away, and the world went silent, and odorless, and black.

Chapter Eight

T
OTAL OBLIVION ONLY LASTED A FEW MINUTES.
H
E WAS
still in the back of the truck when he became aware that they were fitting a wire and leather muzzle over his head. Vaguely he could feel them doing it, could hear them grunt when the truck lurched. His body seethed as if it was filled with insects. Try as he might, he could not move.

He understood, though, that he was in a cage in the back of the truck, and another cage had been fitted over his head.

"Man, this sucker is big."

"Just once I'd like to get it on a leash and go down Hundred and Thirty-Fifth. Nobody bother me then."

"Big boys bother you, little man?"

"Fuck you. Man, look at those eyes, just starin'."

"Starin' at you."

"We gonna gas 'im?"

"Dunno. Cage 'im tonight, in the morning, Tony know what to do."

"Look out, man, he might be comin' 'round. Give 'im another dart."

"No, man, what can he do? He's in the muzzle. Let him wake up. I want to see that sucker on his feet."

"Tear your throat right out."

"Yeah, man. Beautiful."

"You sick, man."

By the time they got to the pound Bob could lift his head enough to see. He could also scent things with great acuity, but the smells were meaningless to him—a jumble of startling new sensations. He could identify some of the odors: the stale fetor of sick breath, of tooth decay and smoker's mouth, the odor of other animals in the truck, the smell of the steel and the plastic and the gasoline. But there were other scents, far more subtle, that seemed elusively beautiful. He was in contact with the world in a new way, but he had no time to appreciate it, for the truck stopped and he was carried down a corridor into hell.

The sound hit him in flashes. He imagined that he was at the exploding muzzle of a machine gun. Then he saw walls of cages all filled with roaring dogs. Their barks were wild and furious, their eyes terrible. Close up, on direct terms with it, he could scarcely imagine the intensity of this passion. The dogs' voices were blasting with fear and savage hate.

They knew he was no wolf, they knew it at once. Quailing in their cages as he was carried past, screaming, their lips frothy, their eyes beyond the border of sanity, they leaped and clawed, trying to get away from the monster that was being deposited among them.

"Don' like the wolf," one of the men said.

"He a mean sucker. They knows it. He kill ten of 'em all at once."

"You wanna see 'im fight?"

"Shit, he'd never make it tonight. Tomorra night, though."

"You on tomorra night?"

"Yeah."

"I got fifty bucks says he'll go down against the three shepherds that're up for gassin' Friday."

"You got fifty bucks sayin' that wolf ain't gonna stand against three mangy, broke-down street mutts? I got fifty bucks sayin' you is wrong."

There were slapped hands, then the two men walked out, oblivious to the noise of the crazed dogs. Bob lay on the filthy floor of a large cage, surrounded by other large cages. To his left and right large dogs shrank away from him. Across the aisle a terrier yammered, glaring at him out of scared, dripping pop eyes.

Despite all the noise, the barking and the whining, Bob was overtaken by sleep. It came quite suddenly, a black sheath. Abruptly he was dreaming. It was May 1961: Junior Cotillion Night at the Country Club. He was taking Melissa Costers, driving Dad's enormous new Thunderbird. There was a scent of oleander blossom in the air. He gave Melissa a corsage of gardenias, and the two smells mingled. On the way to the cotillion they listened to Fats Domino on the radio, singing "Blueberry Hill." Bob fell in love with the softly smiling Melissa. He even liked the way she looked in her braces. At a light he asked very solemnly if he could give her a kiss. Their lips touched dryly, then a waiting hunger captured them both and the kiss grew more intimate and humid. Their braces clattered together but neither of them cared. The light changed to green, a car honked and finally came alongside. The driver asked if they needed help.

It was then that Bob discovered that their braces had become locked together. Receiving no answer to his question, the other driver huffed and went away.

Bob woke up, sweating out the hideous waiting for rescuer, the frantic bending and twisting of the braces, the amused stares of the police, the flashbulbs of the
Express
photographer.

He awoke snapping at his muzzle, and knew to his despair why he had been dreaming about braces. The iron bound him, the leather straps tasted of the saline gnaw of a thousand other canines. He got to his feet, glanced around for a water fountain. Then he realized that he had a hangover from the tranquilizer dart. He was sick in a comer of the cage.

Thirsty, and he smelled water. All he could see, though, was an encrusted dish attached to a feeder tube that automatically refilled when the dish was empty. There was something floating in the water, possibly the previous occupant's spittle. The dish was slick with the licking of thousands of tongues. Bob was revolted, and crept to the far side of the cage.

Presently a small man came hurrying along, pushing a cart stacked with bowls. He thrust one into each cage through a spring-loaded door. The dogs commenced eating at once, gobbling down the appalling mess with gusto.

They were a dull group of creatures, these dogs. They were tired and broken, most of them, standing in these cages awaiting their turn in the gas chamber, which was a little black hutch at the far end of the room. Bob tried to remember how long animals were kept here before being destroyed. Five days, wasn't it?

Surely Cindy would manage something.

But time passed, and he remained in his cage. The light coming in the high, barred windows changed, grew thin. Bob yearned toward that light. His initial despair had given over to fury. Most of all he was furious at science for giving him no hint at all that this could happen. He had grown up in the illusion that there is something fundamentally stable about the universe. But that was a lie. It was only stable for those who believed it to be stable. If you did not so believe, you risked personal catastrophe. How many others had ended up like him, stuck in the bodies of creatures that had interested, inspired, or obsessed them?

He walked over and stared at the drying glop in the bowl. It was so damn stupid. He had to get out of this mess. The thing was, he hadn't felt any control over his transformation. So how could he hope to change himself back?

He searched his mind, trying to understand how this had happened to him. All of his life he had been fascinated by wolves. He had tried to observe them in the wild in Minnesota, but had gotten only a few glimpses. They were the devil to track. Hunters flushed them into clearings and shot them from helicopters. Bob had used years of tracking skills, gained from the Boy Scouts, from books, from professional guides. Still, the wolves had eluded him.

All but one. This was a she-wolf, young, weighing no more than eighty pounds. He had been crawling down a brush-choked ridge to a little stream when he had encountered a thatch of gray-brown fur. He had felt ahead and discovered the animal. She had been so frightened by his approach that she had become like a thing of rubber. There had been a brief moment between them. Her eyes had met his. He had thought himself the possessor of a great secret, to stare into the enigmatic, panic-clouded eyes of this alien creature, to see her as she was in her own world, a place intended to be hidden from human eyes.

Had that done it—had something of her somehow stuck to him all these years, some strange seed . . .?

But this was a matter of the flesh, of the real, immutable body, of blood and bone and skin. There had been some kind of dance of atoms, for they had reordered themselves. Wouldn't there have been a discharge of energy as the molecules of his old body broke their borders and sought new ones? And why had he first melted, then re-formed?

It was all completely impossible. And yet here he was in this cage with a bowl of dog food to eat. Not a very high quality brand, either, judging from the fatty bits and the chunks of what looked like organ meat suspended in the dissolved cereals. He sniffed at it. Most unappetizing. He wanted eggs, bacon, orange juice, and coffee. He wanted toast, dammit, butter, a bit of strawberry jelly. He wanted the
Times
and maybe another cup of coffee. He wanted all of these things at the Elephant and Castle restaurant on Prince Street, with Cindy sitting across from him with her croissant and cappuccino.

He wanted them now!

When the echo died away, he realized that he had somehow learned to bark. He had rattled away like the worst of them, yammering at the top of his lungs.

What a foul degeneration. He was now a coarse beast, he couldn't say a word, he couldn't turn a key, he had no clothes and had only garbage to eat. There was a gas chamber right out in the middle of the room and they were soon going to put him in it, and this terrible mystery was going to die. A human being who had gone through the mirror was going to come to a choking end, pitiful, terrified, claustrophobic.

All around him dogs licked bowls, paced, slept, barked, whined, defecated, urinated. The air was a fog of canine odors. When the door to the front of the building opened, expectant noses twitched, eyes followed the coming of the men with the big plastic garbage bags. They opened a cage and took a scrabbling animal down to the gas chamber. In a moment it was locked inside. The others paced and panted, then a buzzer rang and the inert form was pulled out and stuffed into a bag. Another dog, this one screaming and running, was processed. Then another, and another and another. The cages were disinfected.

Didn't these people realize that the dogs knew what was being done here? They all knew it was a charnel house. But they could not make the leap of consciousness to see that they themselves would be victims in a few days. They could not see this. When the men went away with their bags of cadavers, the other dogs settled down to an afternoon of licking themselves, pacing, barking, and sleeping.

Bob was alone. He could not befriend one of these creatures, for they had not his intelligence. He could not tap out signals or share noble thoughts in this filth.

During the day new dogs were brought to fill the cages of the old, most of them scruffy, terrible creatures, things of the streets. One was so emaciated that all it did was lie on its side. When a keeper offered it food, it gently licked the man's hand and closed its eyes.

Whenever a new beast was brought in, the other dogs barked. For Bob there could not be any real rest or even contemplation—much less sleep— with the cacophony. He kept wanting to believe that it was mindless, but the more he listened, the more he heard something new in it.

He heard a song, built on a very definite, very unhuman esthetic, but certainly a song. When dogs barked they expressed excitement or fear or rage, but they also expressed a beauty, something in its way as subtle as the luster of an aria. An aria, or was it a prayer? There was joy in it, even from these trapped beasts, and when one of them went to the gas chamber and the others barked, it seemed to Bob that the unseen world shifted and fluttered in sympathy.

"It isn't eating. It hasn't touched a thing through three feedings."

"Shit, I got fifty bucks on it. I hope it ain't sick."

"The pool's seventeen hundred dollars, you aren't the only one who doesn't want it to be sick. I've got some money on it myself. It's an exceptional wolf. Must weigh in at a hundred and sixty pounds, maybe a little better."

"It jus' look at you. You think it wants to eat us?"

"Don't take the muzzle off before the fight. If that's what's keeping it from its food, it can wait a little longer."

"That lady been by. We say we ship it up to Queens."

"I've got a buyer already. Movie guy."

"That lady done los' her a wolf!"

The man in khaki and the one in the soiled white coat left. Bob followed them with his eyes, hungering for their freedom, their voices, their beautiful hands.

The implications of their conversation were so unfortunate that it was a few minutes before Bob fully realized what had been said. Then it hit him a solar blow: he ran back and forth in the squeeze; he panted and snapped at his muzzle; he butted his head against the cage, finally stared in fury and frustration at the rusty padlock. Given the muzzle, he couldn't even chew it—not that he'd have a prayer of chewing it through.

They were stealing him, if they didn't kill him first. Made to fight to the death, then sold to some movie producer for God knew how much money —it was outrageous, criminal.

He raised his head and found that he could howl, and it felt good to howl out the misery of his situation. God, though, was as silent as ever He had been when Bob used to pray the Our Father and the Hail Mary. He hadn't been really Catholic since he was twelve, but now the nobility of the old prayers returned to his mind. He saw his religion as a grand and rather pitiful human attempt to somehow speak back to the mute wonder of creation. He had prayed just now, with his howl.

The dogs had fallen silent. Many of them were staring at him, and in their faces he could see reproach. He knew why: he had interrupted the song of the barks with a noise that did not fit. One little Shih Tzu in a tiny cage yapped. Then a terrier, then a mutt, and another mutt, and a burned mutt and a starved mutt, and two shepherds, and some other nameless breeds, and then like a night full of crickets they were going at it again, deep in their esthetic.

It came to him with great force that he was the only creature here who was not already in heaven. Nothing could happen to these dogs that really mattered to them. They were all lovers, they had all seen God many times in the human form, and theirs was the celebration of the heavenbound.

He yapped, but it was wrong, a sullen little note in these symphonics. He brought the habit of concept, of memory and forethought with him from the human world. That was why he was so much less than the dogs, why his voice lacked timbre and resonance. He had the past to savor, the future to fear, the present to endure. The dogs had only their barking. They strove to make it fine and exciting and fun. It was prayer, yes, but also entertainment: they were singing a song of dog-affirming.