The Wild (12 page)

This was not an unhappy place. Dogs suffered terribly here, yes, but the suffering only reached so deep. The gay tails, the flags on the jumping bodies of the condemned, attested to the persistence of life and the triumph of dogdom in a way that nothing in human experience could, save perhaps the singing that came from the gas chambers of World War II, when briefly man had experimented with treating himself as he did the animals. He longed to ask these dogs: "How does it feel to love a master, to live with and see and smell a God?" And how does it feel to be deprived of this love? Each dog was a detailed, complex tragedy. Lost, given away, abandoned, forgotten. They knew what it was to be discarded by someone they adored. Why then were they not lovelorn, and what was this strange humor in the barking? Did they see themselves as absurd? Were they capable of sensing the ridiculousness of being a dog?

When once a woman came looking for a dog to take home, the whole place filled with a smell as if of hope, and dog after dog shambled to the edge of its bars, dancing and panting its friendliness.

"That one you can't have," the vet said to the woman, a girl of perhaps twenty, with clear, hard eyes and the heart-stopping skin of the just-formed.

"Is he a husky?"

"He's a wolf."

"You're kidding!"

"No, ma'am, that's a full-blooded male timber wolf in the prime of life."

"What's he doing here?"

"Bit a guy's foot off. Cops confiscated him as an illegal pet."

"I don't want any problems like that!"

"No, ma'am. Now, let me show you this little husky over here. Name's Rindy. Got him in two days ago."

"Hello, Rindy. Rindy?"

A wave of ambrosial odor poured from the dog at the sound of its name. It wagged its tail, it shot gladness and welcome from its eyes.

The whole pound awaited the decision of the human goddess, who turned with a murmured instruction to call her when a female husky came in. When he saw she was leaving, Rindy circled his tail, climbed his cage, panted, yapped, licked at the withdrawing hand. This was blood-love, this feeling the dogs had for humankind. They were not capable of hating people, only of fearing them.

The pound was silent for a time after the young woman left. Then the barking started again, a rhythmic mystery.

Chapter Nine

C
INDY FELT LIKE SHE WAS TUMBLING DOWN A SCREAMING
well when she saw poor, netted Bob disappear into the elevator in the hands of a bunch of near thugs. Blotches of fur stuck through gaps in the net.

It was more than she could bear. A curious silence enveloped her. Little Kevin hopped around like a frenzied dwarf, trying to break through to her. She watched him, heard him calling her name. Or was that all a dream?

Eventually he gave up, lay down on the couch, and slept a miserable sleep. Cindy stared at a comer of the rug.

A long time later the door buzzer rang. It was now nearly three o'clock in the morning. The buzzer rang and rang. Cindy heard it as a voice calling from the top of the well. It didn't seem very important. Then she heard Kevin, saw his stricken face. "Monica is here," he said.

Monica, Monica, the ocean whispered. Monica, the ocean said. Monica, Monica.

Monica soon appeared beside Kevin. Something tickled Cindy's face. Monica's hands were holding Cindy's cheeks. It felt nice.

A blow followed, sharp and colored red. It exploded the numbness. "Kevin," Monica said, "that sort of thing is unwise!"

"It worked."

Her son had struck her.

"Can you feel your body?"

It was as if she was enclosed in a cotton wool.

"Sort of."

"Hysteria. Under the circumstances, an appropriate reaction."

Kevin's voice cracked. "She was like a wax statue, just sitting there. I couldn't get through to her! Monica, I was scared."

Cindy realized she had frightened her dear man-boy. She had to pull herself together, she was a mother. He lay against her chest, and she stroked his trembling body. "It's going to be all right, Kevin. You'll see."

He drew back from her. "Please don't act like I'm eight, Mother. I'm twelve, remember. I know what's going on." He looked at Monica. "They took him away. He bit Jodie's dad. The police saw he was a wolf—" Kevin stopped, became the little boy again. His body shook and he stifled his cracked sobs into his mother's breast. It was all she could do not to cry with him.

"The police?" Monica's eyes implored for more. Cindy told how they had taken him. Still listening, Monica bustled across to the kitchen and ground some coffee. In the middle of it she stopped. "Get a lawyer." Cindy did not like to hear tremor in that voice. Monica had to be strength.

"I thought of that. What do I do? Call Stanford and tell him he's got to get Bob out of the pound?" Saying it, she was suddenly convulsed with a fit of laughter. Monica watched her, appraisal in her eyes. When it ended, she went back to preparing the coffee.

Kevin became furious. "Don't you dare laugh! This is the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody just about. It's horrible." His hands had become fists, his face pasty gray.

"I'm sorry. Monica's right, I'm in a state of hysteria."

The pot whistled and Monica poured the coffee.

Sipping from her mug, feeling a little stronger, Cindy began to wonder what Monica had found at the library. She was unsure about asking, though. She did not want to hear a hopeless prognosis.

"It is a disease, isn't it?" Kevin did not share Cindy's hesitancy.

"Kevin, I don't know for sure."

Cindy felt cold within. "Is there anything, any information?"

"Cindy, I'm afraid it's a genuine medical miracle."

"A miracle? Gee, thanks, God, thank you so much! How about more miracles? Turn me into a frog, Kevin into a sheep! Miracles are supposed to be good!"

"The whole event defies physics, biology, all understanding."

"No, ma'am," Kevin said. "Not quantum physics, not if you assume subjective reality. Or if the Many Worlds theory is an accurate reflection of the actual situation, then you could even argue that this was inevitable, in one or another universe. Given many worlds, everything that might happen will happen, and each possibility will create its own universe."

Cindy looked at her son, hurting with pride and love. "What actual material did you find, Monica? Anything?"

Monica might have understood Kevin better, because she ignored Cindy's question and flared up at him. "What the devil are you getting at? You're saying that princes
do
turn into frogs?"

"I'm saying that they could. It might be that we've only recently—say, in the past ten thousand years or so—gained enough imaginative stability to prevent our dreams from coming true. One of the greatest achievements of civilization might well be that it has contained the mind and shorn it of its ability to project into physical reality."

Monica rocked back on her heels, her eyes wide at Kevin's unexpected brilliance. "All I found was folklore, Grimms' fairy tales, Apuleius's account of the wolfman, and medieval superstition. Nothing modem. A couple of movie scripts."

He began noisily sucking the dregs of a box of Hawaiian Punch through the little straw that came with it.

"No scraping bottom," Cindy said automatically.

"If what you say is true, why don't we have more recent incidents?"

He looked at Monica over his box. "Who's to say we don't? The thing is, once people change, they're gone. Maybe there are a lot of them, changed into what they loathed or loved— whatever fascinated them enough. The people that do it might be genetic throwbacks or something."

"They never come back?" Monica winced at her slip even as she asked the cruel question. Kevin and Cindy clung to one another.

"There are no stories," Kevin said quietly.

Monica had to remind herself that this was not speculative. She had seen Robert Duke change. She had seen the slow alteration of the body, had massaged him with her own hands as his skin became soft and dry and fur emerged in clumps and sprays. She had to ask herself the fantastic question, were there others out there like Bob?

It was a fearful thing even to be in the room -where it had happened. The event challenged her most fundamental assumptions about the nature of thought and the boundaries of the mind. What is a concept, or a fantasy? Are there universes filled with the tatters of our fantasies and nightmares, places where we
become
the shape in the dark?

"You came back to tell us you hadn't found a thing!"

"A lot of people wouldn't have come back at all, not after what I saw. I
know
what happened here. But I am back."

"Without any idea of how to help."

The bitterness in Cindy's voice gave Monica a brief rattle of anger. She made sure it had subsided, though, before she spoke again. "I cannot offer a cure—not a magic bullet. What I can offer, and I am willing to try this, is theraputic support—"

"Monica, you can't expect him to sit down and have a session with you? Surely, you must see the joke."

"I'm willing to try. Maybe we can get him back to the real world."

"He's in the real world. An uncommon version of it. Isn't that the gist of what you're saying, Kevin?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Well, then maybe I can help him get back into a common version of it."

Tomorrow morning Cindy intended to march up to that pound and extract him by sheer force of argument. Kevin's analysis had helped her immensely, in the sense that it sounded sensible enough to enable her to rest. In what he said there was a thread, however thin, to the understandable.

It was a matter of fighting idea with idea. If she could conceive of a successful outcome, she could move toward it.

"Why don't we call Stanford in the morning," Kevin said, "and tell him that it's a pet they've taken and we want it back? Don't tell him the whole truth."

Monica stroked Cindy's cheek. "Your color's coming back. I like to see that. Do you think you'd like a little something to help you sleep?"

"No. Absolutely not."

"But you will sleep. It's three-thirty, and there's nothing more to be done until morning."

A weariness was there, waiting to receive her. Cindy went back into her own dark bedroom. Was this how widows confronted the first night, looking across the sea of perfect sheets? No, not perfect. There were wrinkles in the middle where she had sat waiting for him earlier, sat like a spider.

She had lashed out at him, struck him. But they had no money. She had to do it, to inject him into the real world, to
make
him earn something.

How stupid, how arrogant. Now what would she do? Abandon his office and everything in it, for starters. She dropped onto the bed fully clothed. What about money? What about breakfast? And would Stanford work without payment? Didn't they owe him, too?

So many questions.

"Mom, can I stay with you?"

"Sure. There's room—" She had been about to add "on Dad's side," but the words did not come.

She lay in the dark, the huddled form of their child beside her, the talisman. Monica came in and silently held her hand for a time.

She plunged into black, empty sleep.

The ringing of the telephone woke her. At first she thought it was the alarm clock, time to get Kevin off to school. The rhythm of it was what made her come to full attention. Then Kevin was standing with the receiver in his hand, holding it out to her.

"Hello?"

It was a moment, listening to the snide young voice on the other end of the line, before she understood that she was talking to a newspaper reporter. "We understood that you are the owner of a wolf that attacked a Mr. John O'Neill. Would you care to make a comment?"

Her mind cast wildly for something to say. From somewhere she recalled the ritual formula. "No comment."

"I'll be writing that you harbored this wild animal, is that correct?"

"No." Now that she fully understood the implications of this call she was grim with fear. What would happen to Bob now?

"Look, Mrs. Duke, you can save that stuff for the movies."

"Please leave me alone. Don't hurt us."

"I'm just trying to get a story."

"Don't hurt us!"

"Your wolf hurt a man pretty badly. Don't you think that entitles the public to know, at least how long you've had the wolf? And what's its name?"

"We found it on the street," she said miserably. "A week ago."

"Is that all? What street?"

"Fifth Avenue."

"You're kidding, a wolf just walking down Fifth? How did you capture it?"

"We fed it a ham-and-cheese croissant. It was starving." A lump of coldest ice had settled in her gut. This was only going to lead to more trouble. "We didn't know it was a wolf until the police came. We had no idea."

Without so much as a good-bye, the reporter hung up. Why not, he had what he wanted. To him other human beings must be no more important that dumb animals.

It was too early to call Stanford, so she contented herself with making a breakfast of oatmeal, orange juice, and tea. Kevin came in and ate. Monica, who had stayed on the couch, stretched and rose, and drank some coffee. In a dull voice Cindy told her about the reporter.

"That's all we need."

"God, what'll it lead to? Poor Bob's going to become a cause celebre."

"We've got to get him out before the story breaks. Have you called your lawyer?"

Cindy glanced at the kitchen clock. She tried his number, although she didn't have much hope at 8:40 in the morning. He surprised her, though, by both being there and answering his own phone.

"Cynthia. How long has it been? A year at least."

"At least that, Stanford. Stanford, we have a problem."

He remained silent.

"We've had our pet wolf confiscated by the city."

The sound that came over the line was like that a man might make on discovering a spider has gotten into his trousers at a funeral: a politely constricted whinny.

"It's in the pound. We want it back."

"A wolf-dog? A breed of dog?"

"No, an actual wolf."

"It's an illegal pet? No permit?"

"We didn't know we needed one. We found it on a street comer."

"You found it, or Bob?"

"Bob."

"Ah, now this begins to make some sense. Bob brought home a wolf and it has been taken away. You want me to have the animal released to your recognizance. But not, I presume, to Bob's."

"Bob is my husband. To both of us."

"Cynthia, do yourself a favor and keep Bob well in the background. Don't let him talk to the police or go to the pound. If anybody asks why, tell them he's indisposed."

Bob had been Stanford's client for many years. He had been in the middle of some unusual capers, such as the matter of the automatic theater seats that folded up around their victims, and that of the blue bread made from seaweed. He had also helped Bob with the FBI when he had tried to set up a series of computer conferences in Bulgaria. It had not occurred to him that the computers he had shipped out ahead of his own departure were proscribed, and that the Bulgarians had agreed to his project simply in order to get them. He wound up losing thirty-one thousand dollar's worth of equipment and narrowly escaping criminal charges. "Don't tell them he's eccentric," Stanford said. "Tell them to call me. I'll explain Bob."

"Bob won't be involved."

"Good. I'll have to look up the ordinance on dangerous pets to see if it's changed, but back a few years ago I had a client who had some trouble about importing a jaguar. As I recall, it was a pretty straightforward matter. The city wouldn't allow it in. New York takes a dim view of dangerous pets. Too crowded."

That sounded bad. She strove to keep the wild rising panic out of her voice. "Could they ship the wolf to another city and let us take possession of it there?"

"Well, we'll see. I'll give the law a look and telephone you back."

"When?"

"Oh, soon. Why?" Suspicion was creeping into his voice. He knew perfectly well that there was more to the story.

"We're afraid they'll hurt him. He's a wonderful creature. We all love him terribly."

"People and their pets. I have my cats. If they were impounded, I'd be beside myself. I'll get to it right away."

Monica had made some instant oatmeal. They ate in silence, drank orange juice and more coffee.

It was agreed that Kevin would not go to school during the family emergency. Cindy ate because she knew she needed strength. She was not hungry.