The Wild Read Free Page A

height. Moe was a pulsating shambles, save for one rear leg, which was running furiously. There was nobody around, it was a block to home, and Moe was dying. Bob had screamed while Moe popped and spluttered.
    Bob ran through the lush neighborhood, which had become a moonscape of empty houses and houses that would not answer the door. He had gotten home to find his own house also empty. He had called his father at the office. "Moe can't live, Bobby," his father had said. "You take my shotgun down and help him out of his misery."
    Then there was a twelve-year-old boy, his eyes soaked with tears, rushing down the hot, empty street with a big old Remington held at port arms, who aimed the gun at the flapping puddle on the street, and shot, sending up a great splash of blood from the body of his beloved. The boy then turned the shotgun on himself, only to find that his toe could not—by an act of the goodness of God— reach the trigger. He looked down the smoking barrel into his deepest, truest wish. At last, dragging the gun, he made his way home.
    The agony of that experience reasserted itself. Was the wolf rabid, sick, would it be taken up to the pound and gassed, ending its life in the ultimate prison, a chamber so small it would have to be stuffed in, with the gas hissing from the jet in the back? "Cindy, I am leaving this zoo. If you and Kevin want to stay, you can."
    She knew him too well to abandon him. "Let's go to a coffee shop and get some lunch," she said.
    Their son was not unwilling to leave. Bob usually did not dare to look at his drawings, and yet these were the very opposite of violent. He had rendered a portrait not of the tapir but of the wolf, a full face, eerie with knowing. "It practically posed. It was staring at you, Dad. Do you think it knows you love wolves?"
    "I don't know."
    Kevin took his father's and mother's hands, and they went out into the streets of the strange old city. "I wish we were in the country," Kevin said.
    "Not when your dad has to travel on Sunday night. It makes things too hectic for him."
    He thought of their rented house up in Ulster County, of Mount Tucker jutting up behind it, and the loons calling on the lake and the doves, and the occasional scream when something captured something on the mountainside.
    Once he had watched a fox eating a small rabbit. The fox had torn out its bowels and was lapping at them while the rabbit shrieked. Or, another time, he had seen a rat taken by a red hawk. The rat knew what it was to be torn to pieces while being lifted into the happy sky.
    Sometimes, warm in bed in his apartment, his wife sleeping beside him, his son in the next room, he thought he was close to a secret of incredible importance, the secret of why life was so involved with suffering, the secret the north wind said when it roared through the snowy pines, the secret of the fire in the plains, burning because it had to bum, the dog dying because it had tried to bite a rolling wheel, or the secret the great timber wolf had dreamed as it succumbed to the zoo hunter's numbing dart. But then something would happen, his own body would go urgent or something, and thoughts of secrets would come to an end.
    "Would you like a hamburger, Kevin?"
    "Fine, Mom."
    Bob didn't want hamburgers. He wanted to take his family to the Plaza, and dine in the Palm Court on finger sandwiches, followed by enormous slices of cake and strong, black coffee. He wanted to do this while listening to a Vivaldi concerto played by the Palm Court String Quartet. And perhaps to start with, a champagne cocktail. Furthermore he wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon in a movie, any movie as long as it was gaudy and loud, and he also wanted to float out of himself across the sky of the city, to float above the towers, off farther and farther, until the last sound from below whimpered out, and he could see stars in the middle of the day.
    He would let go the mystic chain, and fall then. But he would not end up back on