The Wild (18 page)

It would have been easy to just stop paddling, but there could be no question of that now. His experience of drowning had cured him of any desire to do so; the closeness of death had ignited in him a hunger for more life. He worked furiously in body and mind, trying to find some way to survive.

He had entered that state beyond exhaustion, where the flesh is supported only by will. It is a condition of rapture that seems while it lasts that it might go on forever. It doesn't. The end is always complete and total collapse. Bob swam on. There were lights ahead, but he could not tell if they were a ship at anchor or the Jersey shore.

Then he heard a bell ring loudly and he understood that one of the lights must be a buoy, and perhaps quite near. He cocked his ears—water ran down inside, roaring and causing these fine wolf ears excruciating pain.

There was a flash of white noise in his head. His chest constricted, he gagged. Dimly he realized that he was now completely submerged, still paddling but no longer powerfully enough to keep himself afloat. He remembered a morning long ago, fishing for perch at the John 0. Fishing Camp with his father, looking down into the green water, wondering that there were creatures who needed it as we need air. He remembered the flopping struggle of the caught fish, the astonishment in their golden flat eyes.

Then he surfaced, heard the bell, and knew he was soon going to stop swimming. No matter how hard he tried, his legs were slowing down. For relief he let his back legs stop and churned with his forelegs, just keeping his nose in the air.

The bell rang again, a clear, sharp peal. Before and above him he saw a flashing green light, and he heard the river sloshing against the buoy. He flailed with his paws, touched the bouncing thing. Its sides were smooth, but there was a superstructure that housed the bell. Conceivably he could lodge his front paws up in there and hang on.

He tried to grasp the side of the buoy but his claws scratched helplessly. For hands this would be simple. He tried to concentrate, to picture a hand where his paw now scrabbled, a hand with its flexible fingers, its reach, its power.

No change occurred. It was as if his earlier efforts had drained a battery. Change now seemed completely impossible. He was as much a wolf as he had been a man. He snorted, yapped, tried to hug the buoy with both paws. The buoy was rusty above the waterline, and he dragged slowly down until he reached the algae that clung to the base, whereupon he slipped and splashed off into the water.

Excited, snapping, frantic, he came to the surface and tried again. This time his forepaws held. He scrambled with his rear paws, trying for at least a little purchase in the goop that adhered to the buoy's underwater surfaces. Again he kicked, and again failed, and came slowly down the side. Then one claw caught what was probably the rough edge of a weld. For an instant he was poised, unmoving. He could feel his forepaws beginning to slip. Another inch and he would topple backward into the water. Slowly, carefully, he began to straighten the rear leg that was holding. First a bare quarter of an inch, then another quarter, he slid up the buoy. It was working, definitely. Higher and higher he slid, stretching at last to his full length. He felt the edge of the cage that enclosed the bell. Then he was falling, twisting, splashing, turning beneath the waves. He came up fast, slamming his head against the bottom of the buoy so hard he saw a pink flare behind his eyes and was for a moment stunned.

•Then he made his way out from under and surfaced again. His swimming was slow. He might as well have been wearing saddlebags filled with lead. If only he could shed this soggy fur, if only he could rest just for five minutes. He could actually hear cars on the shore, horns honking at the tunnel entrance, the sigh of the roads, even a radio playing on the bank, entertainment for some lonely fisherman.

He wanted life, his blood hungered for it, his breath sped through his lungs for it, he yearned toward the shore. He did not think he could make it. There were now just two choices, either he could try the buoy a last time, or he could attempt another fifteen minutes in the water. If he failed at either, he was dead.

The buoy rang again, its sound deafening and yet also peaceful, reminding him of a church at dawn, of the flat seascapes of the world. He smelled coffee and hot dogs. The fisherman had opened a snack.

Desperate now, Bob struck for the shore. The buoy was useless to him. Every few moments he would find himself underwater. It would take a burst of energy to get him to the surface, and every time he did that he was a bit less able. Soon he was spending more time below the surface than above it. His ears were roaring, his muscles were frantic, he wasn't getting enough air.

Then the water was suddenly very cold and the lights were whirling again. He was in a powerful current. He relaxed, realizing that this was the end. The lights, which had been no more than a few hundred feet away, began to get smaller. He sloshed with listless paws, waiting for his body to give up its struggle. The water caressed him. He closed his eyes.

As soon as he sank he found himself rolling against rocks. Rocks! They couldn't be more than five feet below the surface. He paddled again, reached the surface, flopped and splashed, looking for a place shallow enough to stand. But he was rushing along so fast he couldn't even begin to get purchase. The rocks tantalized him, sweeping by just below the tips of his paws.

Then he came to something quite solid. The current literally shoved him against it. He found himself clambering over cutting stones, clambering and swaying. He stood, astonished, his head hanging, too weak even to look up. Then he toppled to his side, his legs still weakly paddling, but they paddled air, for he had come up on a rocky promontory of the shore.

"Oh Lord, who—" Bob heard the voice of the fisherman, smelled his food, his coffee. His impulse was to run, but he was beyond anything so draining. All he could do was lie on his side just where he was, and stare with one open eye up into the dank gray-red sky of fog and mist.

"You is a dog. Lord, you done swum out of the Hudson, ain't you? Lord, Lord."

He took off his own coat, the fisherman, and rough-dried Bob's freezing, soaking fur. Then he stroked his head. "All I got is the end of a wiener," he said. "Ain't much food for a big dog like you, but it ain't air either."

Then there was meat at his lips, meat and bread and tangy hot mustard. Even a little kraut. Bob gulped down the food. His eyes closed. The fisherman threw an old, dank tarp over him.

Soon there was a slight warming of his body, which was an infinite comfort. At once he slept, and he dreamed that he had come to the reefs of heaven, and found there an old black man with a hot-dog end and a rotting square of canvas, who was an angel of God.

Part Three
Country Life

The country has been amputated, its soul
is bigger than its place.

The country has perfect mist, morning light
that reconstructs what is true.
The country is where you go to find what you lost,

and find what lost you.

—Robert Duke, "Country Life" (1989)

Chapter Fifteen

T
HE MORNING SUN HEATED THE CANVAS TARP.
W
HEN
Bob awoke, it was from a nightmare of the gas chamber at the pound. His fur was steaming, his body sanded with pain. It was as if every muscle had been wound with barbed wire. His stomach was tight and sour. He was ravenous. In his mouth there lingered a maddening temptation of hot dog.

He got up, shaking the canvas off his back. All around him were dank, twisted rocks. Beyond rose a cliff of the lower palisades, tall and complicated. He moved forward, sniffing the crisp air. Everywhere there was the sour sweetness he was coming to recognize as the ground odor of human bodies. Above it was the stink of the river, the nostalgic rot of autumn leaves, warm asphalt, faint car exhausts, and a musty odor of animals, no doubt the rats that lived along the riverbanks. His stomach knocked and a film of drool covered his tongue.

He was damned if he was going to eat a raw rat. And yet he found himself imagining a lovely steak tartare, the way they would serve it at the Palm, one of his favorite restaurants. It had been a long time since he could afford lunch at the Palm.

Would he get rabies from eating a rat? Well, that was nothing to worry about. He would never eat anything alive. He was going to be the first noncarnivorous wolf.

His real desires were for a cup of coffee ground at home from Jamaica Blue Mountain beans, some flaky croissants from Patisserie Lanciani, and a nice stupefying Sunday morning with the
Times
and WBAI's
Music of a Sunday Morning
in the background. Add to that some fresh-squeezed orange juice from the Korean market on Bleecker, and perhaps—just to be bad—a couple of slices of bacon.

Even so, the rats smelled kind of good. He couldn't see them, of course, but he knew they were there, and he sensed that every rat eye was on the monster that had intruded on their domain.

Maybe there were delis with salad bars here in Jersey. He could burst in and start gobbling down the
kappa maki,
the endive, and the
olivata.
He'd be shooed away, of course, but what the hell. Hit three or four delis and he'd be full.

There was movement before him, back near where the old road passed under the cliff's face. He cocked his ears and was rewarded with a richly detailed scuttle of noises: the chugging of rat breath, the silver rustle of rat paws on stone, the swallowed whines of rat fear.

They knew what he could not yet admit, that in the end he would hunt them, that among them there was one who soon would die. He drew deep, exploratory breaths, hoping that the fisherman had left some bits behind. Even one of the greasy, tumor-ridden Hudson fish would be preferable to a rat. For God's sake, rats were nothing more than reprocessed garbage.

His body's motives were not those of his mind. His body simply wanted to eat. It was also efficient And it was working on the problem. While he worried, it had targeted a hole that was full of rats. His ears said that they were seething there, uneasy, noses pointing toward him. When he moved forward, there was a tensing. He stopped;

Soon the tension died down. He found that his tail had lifted, and he felt some sparkle in himself, a glee as sharp as glass. He pranced forth on the hunt—and saw not just one hole but a dozen explode with fast gray shapes. They skittered about, their tails swirling behind them, their little voices shrilling. It was a dance of dread, and he suddenly knew the source of all dance.

His body twisted, skidded, turned, and leaped. Then there appeared in his sight a long rat crusted with offal, its teeth yellow, one eye filmed gray. His nose smelled the saline freshness of its blood, sensed the heat of its body, and he tasted in his muzzle the minute hurricane of its breath, which reeked of wet cigarette ends, pigeon droppings, and bugs.

His muzzle was a quick weapon. Once he had the rat in his vision he was able to follow it with the dexterity of a radar guidance system. A flush of wet filled his mouth. His belly churned, becoming blazing hot. This was a stomach far more powerful than its human counterpart. As he matched the rat's staccato march he noted fierce acid fumes rising from his own throat. Probably his stomach could digest damn near anything.

There came a moment when the rat's neck would be just where he needed it. He reached down, snapped, and drew the scrabbling, screaming creature into the air. It had heft, it was no small rat. When it tried to turn around and bite him, he cracked the whip with its body. As if turned off by the will of God, it went limp. He had killed it as easily as that. It fell from his jaws with a wet thud. Now all the other rats, who had become indifferent as soon as they realized they had not been singled out, took a new interest. There would soon be carrion to scavenge.

Bob sniffed at the thing. Up close he could smell so many different varieties of unpleasantness that he was unable to count them all. The worst, perhaps, was a distinct odor of benzine. The rat also had a scaly growth on the side of its head, that looked almost like the plates of a lizard's brow. A bizarre cancer.

His humanity told him not to touch this diseased thing. His wolfhood wanted to gobble it up and have done with it. He pushed it with his nose. The surviving rats gathered eagerly around, waiting for him to finish.

He wanted to get out of here. But the dead rat kept him lingering. Without hands, how would he skin it? How could he bear the crunch of the bones? His stomach was molten iron. Without any conscious decision at all, he gave the rat's soft underfur a smart nip.

His jaw seemed to go off like a cocked pistol. Entirely without his conscious participation, he had ripped the rat down the middle. Its blood flowed out, steamy and quick, causing eager scurrying to break out among the others. They followed their brother's blood down the cracks and commenced drinking at once, their little lapping filling the still, expectant air.

He recoiled at the sight of the slick, purple guts spilling over the stones. How could he be doing this? A thrill of fascination went through him— this curiously automatic and quite skilled behavior must come from instinct. Becoming a good wolf was like learning a musical instrument.

In this case, though, success would mean actually eating the ghastly mess on the rocks in front of him, something he did not at all want to do. The smell of it, so intense and bloody and alive, made him step back. Then, quite suddenly, one of the rats dashed in and grabbed some offal. That made him growl and lunge forward, and before he could stop himself, the warm meat was going down his throat. He felt it on his tongue, fur and skin and muscle, little rat bones, he tasted it and the taste was absolute meat. Then it was gone, the whole damn rat, even the tail.

He stood there, his head lolling, his mouth open. The revulsion that crawled through his body made him turn up his lips and snarl. When he exhaled, he smelled essence of rat, the freshness of the meat as well as the hollow rot of the filthy fur and whatever horrors had been in the stomach.

He gagged. But he did not bring up what he had eaten. On the contrary, it was perfectly acceptable to his stomach, which was comfortably digesting it.

Good God. He had done something truly unspeakable and yet lived. He was so sensitive, such a careful eater. As a child he had been amenable only to hamburgers and carrots. Over the years his repertoire of foods had expanded, but slowly. Not until he moved to New York had he acquired a taste for real exotica. Now he relished everything from snails to raw abalone.

A great, low booming distracted him from his thoughts. He looked out at the river, and there was the
QE2
flanked by tugs, her white superstructure shining in the morning sun. His heart almost stopped to see her and behind her the jeweled towers, Manhattan in a splendor of glass and spires. He could see people on the decks of the
Queen,
a man in a blue blazer with white trousers, a woman beside him wearing a hat, her mink shining darkly. She raised one hand and held her hat against the wind.

For him it was a bitter sight. The comer of life he had entered was a place of adventure in the deepest sense of the word, where every step was a step into the unknown, where all of his human intelligence and his animal instinct would be required to see him along the way.

His muzzle raised itself to the blue sky and he made a long, high tone he found quite fine. He did it again, this time adding a tremble at the end by relaxing his throat. Again he did it, throwing all of his feelings into the note, his loneliness, his despair, his disgust. These were the feelings that he put into it, but something very different came out. He heard in his howl the voice of a deeper freedom than he had ever imagined, and the sky seemed more blue, and the smells of autumn more poignant, and the booming of the liner more grand. He stopped, excited, his tail waving. The wild was in him, the very wild, the unchained, the innocent, the terrible wild. He knew it from the farthest reach of his human heart, it was the old, old truth come forth in him, resurrection, Eucharist, a new world being born.

He realized with the force of cold water on morning skin that he was feeling a primitive emotion that was essentially and totally human. The ancient human wildness had reemerged in him, cohabitant with the wildness of the wolf.

To have been human at the beginning of the species must have been like this. His first impulse was to run and tell people, to tell anybody he could find, that the wild is waiting for us.

Obeying both sense and instinct, he trotted off up the road, seeking a way to the top of the palisade. Somewhere out there across the human land lay the forest, constricted perhaps, but still the forest. He wanted to race this body against the closure of the suburbs, to seek the quick eye and the savage tooth. As it mingled with his own blood the blood of the rat taught him the morality of the carnivore. Every act is a poem, sniffing the scent-touched leaf, disemboweling the faun.

He was filled with so much energy that it seemed almost like magic. The rat had been just the good food his body had wanted. His instincts had been right. His tail high, his head thrust smartly forward, he moved up and up, making his way among the stones. It was easy to keep to the path: all he had to do was follow the scent of men and fish. This was where they came down, this collection of crevices and rough-hewn stones. Here was a Welch's grape drink bottle, there a Trident gum wrapper. And over it all was the smell of fish and the smell of men, many men, some young and sharp and fresh, others old and covered in sodden wool.

When he reached the top of the palisade, he found himself in a park he hadn't even known existed, a dramatic park overlooking the Statue of Liberty and the harbor. People stood at the edge of the balustrade just above him, some of them leaning into ten-cent binoculars and looking at the
Queen,
which had reached the center of the harbor and was just dispensing with its tugs. Farther east a Staten Island Ferry left its slip. It was rush hour, and a traffic helicopter sped up the Hudson, a green and white bug spewing noise. He looked over this great vista and picked out his old neighborhood. He couldn't see their building, but he could just see the top of the structure that hid it.

He blinked his eyes. His vision was not as good as he would have liked. The colors were muted, the details obscure. But when he cocked his ears, he heard a wonder of sounds. The world's noise was no longer an aural fog. Rather he now heard all the detail of it, the pulsing deep in the
Queen's
engines, the excited voices of the people on her decks, someone hammering in the scaffolding on the Statue of Liberty, somebody else scraping, the engines of the ferry and the splashing of her thick bow, the suspiration of wind around the towers of the World Trade Center, the click of a sea gull's wings, and the hiss of fish rushing in the harbor.

He was a generous man, and at that moment his heart burst with one wish, that all human beings everywhere could just for one instant experience the old world in this new way. He had not known it was like this, had never dreamed what a difference really powerful senses could make. Human eyes were strong, but not so strong as wolf ears, nor nearly so discriminating as a wolf's nose.

A smell startled him, the familiar odor of human fear. When he realized where it was coming from, his heart almost stopped. One of the ten-cent binoculars was pointing directly at him. Two froglike eyes swam in the dark lenses. For an instant he captured them with his own eyes.

He saw deep into them, into the empty soul behind them. He could push, he could twist, he could
alter!

He could make her into a wolf with his eyes!

But the pupils dilated and then drew back. He saw a pale mask of a face peer past the shiny aluminum housing of the binoculars. The face was rapt, closed, the lips tight, the eyebrows knitted. Bob was in too awkward a position to cringe, to cower to this young mask of a woman in her vaguely red sweater and wind-rushing skirt. If only he could make people see him as the inoffensive being he was.

Behind him was the tumbling palisade. He dared not go down, because he knew there was no escape down there. Unless he was willing to try another swim, that was nothing but a trap. Too bad he couldn't fly.

The young woman had darted away from her binoculars without uttering a word. He struggled up the final thirty yards and scrambled over the balustrade. Here was a cobbled esplanade backed by a road, and beyond it a stand of trees. There were perhaps a dozen people on the esplanade, some of them sitting on benches, others strolling, others at the binoculars. Simultaneous with his appearance, there came a cry across the quiet scene. The young woman shouted in a clear, stem tone, her smooth hands cupped around her soft lips: "It's the wolf! The
wolf!"

The whole scene froze. People stopped walking. Those on the benches turned their heads. A man rose up from behind a pair of binoculars and began to hurry across the esplanade, his shoes clicking in the silence.

There was nothing to do but race across the pavement. He ran as fast as he could. This particular movement aggravated last night's thigh injury, sending hooks of pain deep into his leg. But he was still fast. He shot along close to the pavement, his nose down, the cobblestones speeding past. It was only a moment before he was in the trees and racing between their thick-grown branches toward the far end of the park.