The Wild (17 page)

"I can waltz."

"That isn't dancing. What's dancing is what attracts spirits. Ghost dancing." He began to shake, leaning from foot to foot. "You have to jiggle your insides so your soul jiggles. The spirits hear that and they get curious. They're like fish that way, coming up when you jiggle the bait. Only be careful, because your soul is the bait."

Kevin started the same movement. The man began to chant, "eaah, eaah, eaah ea
ah.
" He repeated the simple rhythm, his eyes closed. Then he had a little packet in his hands, made up of fur and bones and bits of skin. "Wolf medicine," he said. "Very powerful. Medicine of the Thunder Wolf."

For fifteen minutes they danced. Occasionally the man went around in a little circle, hopping and chanting. Once he whooped. He took a small rattle from his pocket and shook it. He handed the wolf medicine to Kevin, took it back, handed it over again.

Finally he stopped and took a long pull on his beer. "They aren't coming," he said. "My magic's not powerful enough. I could hear them laughing, though."

"Who?"

"The wolf clan. They're very happy. I don't want to upset you, but it looks to me like they've got him for good."

A rocket blasted into the center of her gut and exploded with phosphorus fire. "Nobody got him for good! He's mine, do you hear that! He is mine and I am going to have him back. My God, Bob was one of the gentlest, most humane people I've ever known. He was this boy's father. He's ours. I'll curse the whole species of wolf unless they give him back to me."

"Stealing's never a good idea, I guess."

"Get out of here, you old idiot! You're like some quack with a fake cancer cure. And if you tell the papers that the wolf is really Bob, I will come after you and personally kill you, and believe me, I will do it slowly."

He smiled, the whole bottom half of his face cracking open in a paroxysm of black pits, gnarled stumps, and yellow teeth. "What will you use, the claw or the tooth?"

Shaking like a disturbed longleg spider, she guided him to the door. "Get out."

"Thanks for the swallow of beer."

She slammed the door behind him. Kevin came and put his arm around her waist. That felt awfully good. Now if only Bob was standing on her other side . . .

"I'm going to find your father and bring him home and turn him back into a man."

"Yes, Mom."

"You'll help me?"

"Mom, of course I will."

She told him how close she had been to him earlier. "He's been hurt, he's all scruffy. The last I saw of him, he was heading for the far West Village."

They made bacon and eggs and coffee together, and opened the fresh orange juice. Sitting at the kitchen table, in the thin light of dawn, they laid plans, gardens and castles and clouds of plans, to go down the labyrinth that had claimed husband and father, and lead him back to his humanity.

Chapter Fourteen

T
HE STREETS OF NEW YORK ARE ALLEGEDLY NEVER
quiet, but they were certainly quiet tonight. An occasional siren wailed, mist billowed, shadows moved behind windows. After seeing the
Post
extra Bob understood why: this city of seven million lethal human creatures was stifled with fear. The beast of apocalypse prowled its streets. Ancient terrors were invoked. All was quiet.

To Bob, slinking along hurt and cold and famished, it seemed absurd. In his present mood he would gladly have let a child kill him. Smelling Cindy so close had been too keen a sorrow. He could bear no more of this. As he paced the banks of the Hudson, he contemplated jumping from one of the ruined piers and bringing this whole bizarre experience to an end.

The city around him could not have seemed more oppressive or unfriendly. He had ho way of explaining himself, not even in his own mind. His only thought was that ours is an age at the far limit of time, and it is at limits and extremes that the impossible can happen. Or maybe the mysterious fifth force that physicists speculate about had something to do with it. Maybe it was a disease, psychological or otherwise.

He stood looking down at the waters. They were black and smelled of creosote. Lapping and sighing beneath the pier, the river surged in its course. Far out, a magnificent yacht moved in stately passage, its portholes all alight, the sound of its engines coming faintly on the wind.

Bob inhaled, almost believing that he could still smell Cindy's special odor. People's smells were as distinctive as their faces or fingerprints. Were there two smells exactly alike? He suspected not. They hung in layers in the streets of the city, millions of them. He had just noticed this, and was beginning to be able to tell them apart.

He looked down at the water again. How would it feel to die in that murk? Would he struggle, or just go to sleep? It might be a painful death, indeed, like the death of smothering. Once when he was ten, another boy had smothered him in a plastic shower cap, a large, vicious boy. To this day he remembered the gnawing agony.

And the water was cold. He did not know how this miserable body might react to that. Normally he shunned even slightly cool swimming pools. Cold showers, cold days, snow sports were all abhorrent to him.

He could see things floating in the water, big, amorphous things, like great masses of sewage. Doubtless that's what they were. So he would not only drown in the river, he would drown in sewage.

His ears back, his tail down, in his anguish he snapped at the air.

He smelled Cindy again, this time much stronger, as if she was somewhere nearby. It was the perfume of her spirit, this, or the trembling scent of memory. Until he had been blocked by this new body from his relationship with her, he had not understood just how much a part of him she had become.

Then he heard a noise, a tapping on the pier. Figures approached, moving silently side by side, by their smells a man and a heavily scented person, probably a woman. She was so powdered and perfumed that her real smell was almost obscured. There was a faint underlying odor of pus and scabs. He was fresher, the scent of healthy sweat, the remains of deodorant put on many hours ago, a touch of Afta still clinging to his face. The blue odor of oiled metal was chief among those he noticed coming from the woman's purse. He knew she had a pistol hidden there.

There was a quick round of bargaining between them, obviously further to an earlier conversation.

"This ain't exactly a hotel."

"You're gettin' off easy, ten bucks."

"It's cold. I wanna do five."

Her voice, exhausted. "Seven."

They came closer, the prostitute and the john. Bob stayed absolutely still, embarrassed and ashamed to be witness to their humble and private business. Closing his eyes did nothing to shut them out: he smelled them, he heard them. The woman was kneeling before the man, the man leaning against a piling, his fingers working in her hair.

In a merciful few minutes it was over. There was a stink of hot bodies. The woman made a rustling movement. "Take off your clothes," she said in a low voice. The gun was in her hand.

She tossed everything into the Hudson—the underpants, the socks, the shoes, the cheap suit.

"Please, lady."

She opened the wallet. "Eighty fuckin' bucks," she said in a new, harder voice. No wonder all the powder: she was a man. "I oughta blow you away."

The transvestite turned and marched off the pier, leaving his john cowering naked. "What am I gonna do?" he moaned. After a short time, he also hurried back toward the darkness of West Street, a pale flash in the night.

To Bob that poor man seemed the luckiest of creatures, normally formed, his body the key to the whole list of human freedoms and powers.

The wild was not freedom at all; the wild was a terrible bondage. Man was free.

He remembered the wolf in the zoo. That had been the message in his eyes.

Was that wolf like me, a lost man? Was he warning me with his eyes, or cajoling me?

His eyes had been so beautiful. Too bad being a wolf was such hell.

He could escape, of course. All he had to do was let himself fall, then take a single, deep breath after the water enclosed him.

Before he jumped, there was one thing he had to do, if only to satisfy himself that his situation was indeed hopeless. Many years before he had been interested in meditation. TM had been popular when he was in college, and he had tried it. He had met a girl who was involved in the Ecstatic movement within the Catholic Church, and he had gotten high on repetitive prayer.

They had joined together, Bob and Lorelei, on the Way of Flesh and Prayer—their own name for their Catholicized sexual freedom—and had learned secrets of meditation known, if at all, to a few adepts of the
Kama Sutra.

Bob wondered if he could still sense his body in the old way. Could he perhaps re-create his human body by creating a vivid enough image of it in his mind?

With all the will he could bring to it, he concentrated on turning his left rear paw back into a foot. He visualized a foot—his own foot—just as he remembered it, complete with the scar from his bunion operation and the ingrown second toenail he had been meaning to show to Al West, his podiatrist.

Nothing happened, nothing at all. He kept on trying, raising the paw off the ground in the intensity of his effort. Nothing seemed to happen, but when he put the paw down, he was amazed and shocked to feel ordinary human toes and heel. He looked back, and there in the shadows was a pale, naked man's foot attached to his wolf leg.

Pure excitement made his blood rush so hard he started to faint. The foot felt a little like rubber, a lot like gelatin, and it seemed as if a lessening of attention might make it dissolve once again into a paw. The moment he shifted his attention to his upper leg, the foot indeed began to disintegrate. There was no sensation, but his contact with the ground began to change. Then he returned his concentration to the foot. At once it was human again.

But it wouldn't stay like that, not without a Zen master's ability to concentrate on it and keep it human. A very real force was urging his cells into the wolf shape. When he fought it, he could feel it resisting, striving to recapture the shifted part.

Then he learned another thing: By keeping some attention on his foot and extending it up his leg, he could transform the leg as well, and include it in the new fortress of his human being. He labored, striving to fix the quicksilver of concentration, until he was a human torso with a wolf's chest, shoulder, and head. There was war inside him. His organs battled the confusion of juices. He vomited and the wolf body regained the torso for a moment. Then he recaptured his attention from his pain and dragged it up his midriff. It slipped, concentrating suddenly on what he wanted most, which was hands. They popped out of his paws, new and slightly wet, knuckles closed against the ground. Then the wolf tail slipped out again. He fought it down, felt the fur of it tickling against his buttocks as it was absorbed.

Now, holding in awareness all of his human parts, he made a great effort to draw his attention up both forelegs and then across his chest and neck. With a rush as of swirling snow his whole sense of smell disappeared. He was shocked to realize how dependent on it he had become. For a moment, shaking his head, he thought he was blind.

Then he saw a flush of color, the crystal world that human eyes see. He was lying, wet and new on the dirty slabs of the pier. He raised himself up.

Shaking, he stood slowly to full height, and felt the sharp airs of night on naked skin. He clapped his hands, he swooped and swirled.

He had to be careful, though. The wolf itched just beneath the surface of him, waiting to pop out the moment he stopped concentrating on his shape.

He remembered a paraphrase of the physicist Richard Feynman, that reality is plastic, that it is essentially dependent upon the observer.

Speaking of whom, he found himself lit by headlights, which proceeded slowly down the rattling pier toward him. He began to back up, momentarily terrified. But why? He was human again. He was safe. Smiling with relief, he ran forward toward the car. "Hey, I need help."

A light bar flashed: it was a police car. "You couple of fuckers," a voice said, drawling easily. "Come aaannn." Two young policemen emerged from the car. Sitting in the back was the dim figure of the man the prostitute had mugged. "What is this, a new thrill?" one of them asked.

"I don't think I—" He stopped. The moment his attention had gone into the effort of speaking, the wolf had leaped up inside, ready to surge out.

"You guys stay at home. We don't want any funny business out on these piers."

"I—I—"

"Get in the goddamn car. We're runnin' youse in. Two creatures start a naked trip out here, pretty soon all the creatures are doing it, am I right?" The officer made a move toward Bob. A strong hand connected with his arm. Bob jumped away: where the cop had touched grew a tuft of fur. "Oh, come on," the cop said in a bored tone. "We'll beat you up if you make this a pain in the ass." He grabbed again.

Bob still felt loose and unreal, like a jelly. He skittered away, dragging a paw on his left arm, then with a dry hiss a whole left foreleg. When he tried to bring back his arm, it would not come.

"Halt, you're under arrest," one of the cops shouted. The other came at Bob, his arms outstretched. Bob backed up, warding off those awful hands with his one human fist.

He saw the misty sky and heard a rush of air around him. Then he hit the water with a whooshing splash. Cold, stinking river water poured down his throat, making him choke. Choking, he sank deeper and deeper, until there was no sound but the pulsing of distant marine engines. Something big and clingy wrapped around his midriff. He struggled to release himself from it, arching his back, clawing, trying to paddle.

His attention was shattered, and he knew that the wolf would win if he didn't regain it. The wolf leaped, struggled, twisted. There was nausea and the seething of skin. He fought: foot not paw, flesh not fur, and then he felt the eerie swinging of the tail. The pressure of the water was slaughtering his ears. He concentrated his whole attention into a single dot of consciousness. And he knew he had won: down in the depths of the river, he was human again. There came the pounding of blood, shock after shock, the hammer of suffocation. He had to breathe. The agony was amazing, total, all-involving, far worse than what he had imagined.

He felt his flesh popping like sausage skin, felt the emergence of the reborn thing as it climbed out of him and became him. Each quake of his heart brought a flash to his eyes. In a moment he was going to take in a heave of water, cough, and commence the unmanaged panic of his dying.

Cold water rushed past his face. He drew back his lips, felt his mouth opening, felt his every muscle straining, his legs churning, his lungs expanding to whistling, airless balloons, then a gust of water blasted down his throat. He gagged, his body contorting to a knot, then he coughed it out, expelling it through his nose, helplessly breathing again—but this time it was cold, dank air.

His head had broken water. Again he breathed, choked, coughed, gagged, breathed, fought the waves, raised his nose high, and swam along, sweeping the water aside with his four powerful legs.

He was an amazing distance away from the pier, and his nose took in the myriad scents of the watery world, the fish, the creosote from all the rotting timbers, the sewage and trash, the skim of oil on the water's surface.

He cocked his ears toward the pier. The two cops were standing there calling, playing their flashlight on the near waters. They were looking for a blubbering human swimmer, though, not the sleek creature who watched them.

He was a wolf again, thoroughly and completely. His concentration had been shattered at just the wrong moment. He screamed out his rage, but this time even that vestige of his humanity was gone. It seemed that his return to the wolf form had worked more perfectly than the first transformation. He was now smoothly wolf: an animal howl echoed across the Hudson waters.

Dog-paddling steadily, he turned himself around and around, seeking the closest shore. But there was no close shore. He was being taken by the tidal current, and taken fast. Manhattan was already farther away than Jersey. He could see the lights of cars emerging from the Holland Tunnel. Far upriver the George Washington Bridge glimmered. A tug sounded its mournful drone. The mist sometimes obscured the riverbanks, making it even harder for him to orient himself.

He had lost sight of the police on the shore. Manhattan was now an anonymous grandeur of lights, coldly self-centered, indifferent to the mere animal that was going to drown before its glow. Dog-paddling was an exhausting way to swim, but if he stopped he sank. He kept his muzzle just above the water, held his ears back to keep the cold out, and dug at the water with his tiring legs. The cold made him ache, the pain distracted him, the spinning lights on the shores made him fear that he was swimming in circles.