When the Nines Roll Over (13 page)

I ran. Down the stairs, out the door, west on Eighty-fourth Street, dodging the street traffic, dashing across the avenues, York First Second Third Lexington Park Madison and Fifth, into Central Park, panting, sweat pouring into my eyes. All the way to Bethesda Fountain, at least a mile, farther than I had run in years. When I got there the crowd bulged way back to the band shell, hundreds of yards from the fountain. A man with a pushcart sold Italian ices and sodas. A news helicopter circled above us.

I shoved and sidled my way to the front lines, ignoring the dirty looks, the muttered heys, watchits, and yos. Blue police sawhorses barricaded the way, a cop stationed every ten feet. Two curving stone staircases flanked by balustrades swept down to the terrace. The lion sat patiently by the angel fountain. Behind him was the stagnant pond where paddle-boating tourists typically photographed the bushes and collided with each other and cursed in every language known to man. They had all been evacuated. I saw my father, halfway down the steps, on one knee, holding his rifle. Two Park Service rangers stood next to him, high-powered dart guns aimed at the lion. Police sharpshooters ringed the terrace.

At the back of the crowd people yelled and whistled and laughed, but up close, in view of the lion, there was cathedral silence. My father gave the order and the rangers pulled their triggers. Darts fly far slower than bullets; I could trace their black flight from gun barrels to lion's shoulder.

The lion roared. His jaws swung open and he roared. All the birds sitting in the trees burst from their branches and squawked skyward, a panicked flight of pigeons and sparrows. Everyone leaning against the barricades fell back, the entire crowd retreating a step as instincts commanded
run, run, run!
A lion's roar can be heard for five miles in the emptiness of the savanna. Even in Manhattan his protest echoed above the constant squall of car alarms and ambulance sirens, above the whistles of traffic cops and the low rumble of subway trains. I imagine that sunbathers in the Sheep Meadow heard the roar, and tourists in Strawberry Fields; that bicyclists squeezed their hand brakes and stood on their pedals, squinted through their sunglasses in the direction of the noise; that old men, piloting their remote-controlled miniature schooners across the algae-filmed water of the Boat Pond, looked west, leaving their ships to drift; that dogwalkers watched their charges go rigid, prick up their ears, then bark madly, until all the dogs in the borough were howling; that every domestic cat sitting on a windowsill stared heartlessly toward the park and licked its paws clean.

The lion stood unsteadily, blinking up at the sun. He began to walk, headed for the staircase, but stumbled after a few paces. Everyone in the crowd inhaled at the same moment. My father gave another command and two more darts pierced the lion's hide, releasing their tranquilizers. The rangers cradled their guns in their arms and waited; four darts were enough to put a rhino to sleep.

The lion charged. He reached the steps so quickly that none of the sharpshooters had time to react; he bounded up the broad stone stairs, white fangs bared, while the rangers fumbled with their guns and the cops standing near me said “Jesus Christ” and backed into the sawhorses and mothers in the crowd covered their children's eyes.

In mid-leap the lion seemed to crash into an invisible wall; he twisted in the air and landed heavily on his side, front paws two steps above his hind paws. The rifle shot sounded as loud and final as a vault door slamming shut. My father ejected the spent shell and it glittered in the air before bouncing off the balustrade and into the vegetation below.

I ducked under the sawhorse, evading the dazed policemen, and ran down the stairs. My father saw me coming and shouted my name, but I was past him before he could stop me. I knelt down beside the lion and held his furred skull in my palms, my forearms buried in his dirty mane. He seemed smaller now, shrunken. The blood puddling beneath him began to drip down the steps.

“Tell me,” I begged him, looking into his yellow eyes. My father was coming for me. I lowered my head so that my right ear rested against the lion's damp muzzle. “Tell me.”

A series of violent spasms ran down the length of his outstretched body. Each breath exited his lungs with an unnerving whistle. His jaws slowly parted. I closed my eyes and waited. He licked my face with his mighty tongue until my father collared me and dragged me aside. I did not watch the mercy shot.

Hours later, when I stood in the shower and let the hot water beat down on me, I picked three blue splinters from my palms. It took me a while to figure out that they came from gripping the police sawhorse by Bethesda Fountain. After the shower I toweled myself dry, pulled on my pajamas, climbed the stairs to my bedroom, locked the door behind me, and switched off the lights. A pale moon shone weakly through the pebbled glass. I tried to remember how many miles away she was, how many cold miles of sky I would need to climb. It seemed impossible to me that men had ever walked there, had ever cavorted in her loose gravity.

When I was young I had known the number, known her distance to the mile. I had known her diameter, her weight in metric tons, the names of her major craters, the precise duration of her rotation around the earth. I forgot everything.

I uncapped General Early's telescope and scanned the apartments opposite. Whatever the old man was looking for in Harlem, he had quit for the night—the lamps were all out and the shades drawn. The little boy was awake. He sat beneath his sheets with a flashlight—a one-boy tent—furtively reading when he was supposed to be sleeping.

I checked the other rooms in my customary search for fire, and this night I found it. Not in the boy's apartment but one flight down, candles burning atop the stereo speakers and bookshelves, the coffee table and turned-off television, the windowsill and mantel. The redhead, naked, straddled a man on her sofa, her hands resting on his narrow shoulders. In the candlelight her flanks were mapped with copper trails of sweat. She rose and fell like a buoy in the sea, bobbing with the waves. Before I turned away, to give them their privacy, the woman flung her head back and stiffened for an instant, her hands falling from Butchko, her fingers spread wide. Her mouth opened but I'm sure no words came out, no words at all, nothing but ecstasy.

THE BAREFOOT GIRL IN CLOVER

When I was sixteen I stole a midnight blue '55 Eldorado convertible and drove to Hershey Park for the afternoon. I never intended to stop in Hershey—nobody flees New Jersey for Pennsylvania. The plan—
plan
! as if I had plotted the whole thing in advance—was two days to California, buying gasoline and potato chips with my father's credit card, never sleeping till I saw the Pacific glittering through the windshield. I chickened out. I had the balls to go, but I didn't have the balls to stay gone.

For seven hours, though, I ruled the road. The sharkish tailfins cut the air behind me;
London Calling
played on the tape deck, over and over; a Virgin Mary statuette swayed from the rearview mirror, her eyes downcast with modesty or dismay. I stole the Cadillac from a Catholic, a senior named Tommy Byrnes Jr. When Tommy had pulled into the parking lot that morning before classes, a crowd of boys gathered around the car, saying
Damn!
and
Whoa!
and
Hoo yeah!
It was a fearsome machine, its chrome grille shining like a mouthful of teeth. It looked like the bully of the freeways, eager to hunt down weaker cars and devour them.

I wanted it. I said, “Tommy, let me run it around the block one time.”

He laughed uneasily. “You don't even have your license.”

“I've got my learner's permit. You ride shotgun.”

Even then, as a sophomore, I was the biggest kid in the school, second-team all-state at left tackle. I was getting handwritten letters from football coaches at Division One universities. People at Mahlus High treated me well. Still, Tommy didn't want me driving his father's car. He explained it to me in detail, the hell he would suffer if somebody got fingerprints on the paint job. A dented fender was certain death. If it was
his
car he'd be glad to let me gun it down the avenues, blasting the horn at every girl we passed, but there was no way, no possibility, that I could drive his father's Eldorado.

I smiled and nodded and held out my hand for the keys.

“Come on, Zabrocki,” said Tommy, shaking his head, and “I can't, man,” and “Look, it's not
mine
,” and finally “Once around the block. Slowly.”

That was the first car I ever sat in that felt as if it were built for someone my size. There was room to stretch my legs and the steering wheel wasn't jammed against my chest. The roof was down and I had miles of open air above my head.

Tommy got in and said, “You know how to drive stick, right?”

“Sure,” I said, turning the key.

“The clutch, Zabrocki. Hit the clutch.”

At the corner of Hudson and Blair, where we stopped for a red light, Tommy said, “You're ruining the gearbox.”

“Maybe you should take over,” I said, opening my door. Tommy nodded happily and got out of the car. Instead of standing I slammed my door and stepped on the gas. The engine roared but the car didn't move. Tommy stared at me.

“What are you doing?”

I finally remembered to shift into first and the Eldorado bolted across the intersection, under the red light. Tommy Byrnes Jr. stood motionless in the Blair Street crosswalk. I watched him dwindle away in the rearview mirror. I figured I'd cruise over to the diner for a triple fried-egg sandwich and be back at school before second period started, but after I'd driven six blocks I realized there would be no schooling for me that day. The Eldorado was freshly washed and waxed, the tank was full, my father's credit card—on loan for the express purpose of buying a new lawnmower that afternoon—was tucked into my jeans pocket, and the sun had already burned away the morning fog. It was May, the days were long, I had a biology test third period and I could never remember the difference between meiosis and mitosis.

I knew Tommy wouldn't call the cops. He'd expect me to return to school smirking, tossing him the keys and laughing at what a fool I'd made of him. He wouldn't want his father to find out that he'd lent the Eldorado to a kid with a learner's permit, so he'd walk back to the school parking lot and wait for me.

This story is making me sound like an asshole; I'm aware of that. I won't blame it on my youth. I knew exactly how miserable Tommy had to feel, I knew I was screwing him over, I knew all about it and I didn't care. It was a beautiful spring day; I was driving a convertible with
tailfins
; when I turned on the tape deck I heard Joe Strummer's guitar licks. There are days when you need to live in violation.

I picked up Route 202 outside of town and headed west. California lay that way, and though I had never thought much about California before, it seemed the natural destination for a young man with a stolen Eldorado. The secret to driving stick, I discovered, was always hitting the clutch. Hit the clutch when starting the car, when shifting gears, when signaling a turn. Simple. All I needed was a girl to stroke my thigh and navigate.

I stuck to the speed limit and winked at the pretty mothers who passed me in their station wagons. I found a pair of aviator sunglasses in the glove compartment. They were too small but I wore them anyway.

Paying the toll with the last coins in my pocket, I crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania, stopping in New Hope to buy an ice-cream cone at Thomas Sweet's. They weren't happy that I charged it on the credit card, they told me there was a ten-dollar minimum, blah blah blah, but I was already holding the cone and licking it. I stood by the Eldorado eating my ice cream, watching the tourists scour the antiques shops.

I gobbled down the rest of the cone and set off for California. After an hour on the road I decided I was still famished, so I drove through the small town of North Wales in search of a hamburger joint. A very small town—people stared at me as I rolled by, as if I were an evil cowboy clopping down Main Street on my black horse. I passed a hardware store and a ninety-nine-cent store and a barbershop and a church and then mile after mile of green farm fields. I don't know what they were growing—I'm a townie; if it's not wheat or corn, I'm lost—but there was a lot of it and it went on forever. I saw a girl in denim shorts and a paint-splattered T-shirt bicycling on the side of the road and I pulled over in front of her. She pedaled up to my door, rested one bare foot on the asphalt, and looked down at me in my Cadillac cockpit. Her bicycle was old-fashioned, with a wicker basket in front adorned with a yellow plastic sunflower.

“I'm looking for Wales,” I told her. She didn't say anything so I added, “There's nothing to eat in North Wales.”