Rutting Season

by Mandeliene Smith

The mother reached over and took a cigarette from a flattened pack of Red & Whites.

  “We got a court order, ma’am,” the bigger officer said. “If you don’t surrender the children voluntarily, we’re going to have to take them.”

  She looked up, and Jared saw that her eyes were hard with anger. “So fuckin’ take ’em then,” she said.

  “It’s just temporary,” Al said. “You can sort it out in court.”

  “Fuck you,” she muttered.

  Al shrugged and turned away. In the silence Jared heard Deanna in the hallway, speaking in that cutesy, high-pitched voice she used with young children. “Let’s pack up a few of your favorite outfits, okay? You have a favorite T-shirt? Or a favorite toy? . . . Oh, is this your other sister? Hi! I’m Deanna. What’s your name?”

  The mother was smoking, looking off at nothing.

  Deanna leaned in the doorway. “Jared,” she said quietly, “would you get the baby?”

  He looked where she was pointing. At the corner of the couch, next to the mother’s feet, was a baby sleeping in a car seat. He hadn’t even noticed it.

  The mother looked up at him as he walked over, a blank look, empty even of hostility, and Jared felt a flash of sympathy. “Excuse me,” he said, softly. He pointed at the baby. “I just need to—”

  In one swift movement she stood up, flung away her cigarette, and scooped the baby into her arms. For a second, everything was still; then the baby’s face crumpled into a scream. “You ain’t takin’ my baby,” she snarled.

  Deanna and the two officers all started talking at once: they had a court order; there would be a hearing; it was only temporary. Jared barely heard them. A wild alarm was pulsing through him. The mother was in front of him, less than an arm’s length away, her eyes watching him with an expression he knew by heart: the cornered, defiant look of a woman who knew she was in for it.

  He couldn’t help himself; he stepped back.

  A gleam came into the mother’s eyes; one corner of her mouth turned up in a sneer. “What a big man,” she said. “Tryin’ to take a baby from her mother.”

  Jared stared at her, the baby’s screams concussing his ears.

  “Whatcha gonna do, big man? Huh? You gonna take my baby?”

  Later, trying to piece it all together, Jared would wonder why he hadn’t thought to just move aside, let the officers do it. There would have been no shame in that. But his brain seemed to have seized.

  “I’m gonna get her arm,” he heard the big officer say, “then you get the baby, okay?”

  The mother kept her gaze on Jared as the cop slowly forced her right arm behind her back. “Big man,” she hissed, her eyes bright with derision. “What a big man.”

  “It’s okay, Jared,” Deanna said from the doorway. “You just go on.”

  Jared could feel the officers looking at him. He was acting like a fool, he knew, like a child. He made himself step forward into the glare of the mother’s eyes. Blindly, he reached out his hands.

  He heard the screech a split second before it hit him. Not the mother—she was still looking right at him—but something that came from the side. Claws raked his skin; then he felt the shock of the teeth, scissoring into his forearm. He flung out his arms and whatever it was flew off him and hit the wall.

  For a moment the weird cat screech cut out and the only sound was the baby screaming. Jared had a split second to see his attacker—her spindly little-girl limbs, the flyaway hair—before she was on him again. He raised his arms, threw her off. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Al spin around on the balls of his feet, light as a dancer, and grab her out of the air.

  “Jesus, Jared!” Deanna said. “Get ahold of yourself!”

  He stood there, panting. The kid was yowling and kicking in Al’s hairy arms, trying to scratch him, too. Still, Jared could see now that it was just a little girl, no more than six or seven; her contorted face was wet with tears.

  He sat down on the couch and put his fist in his mouth.

  * * *

  He had to wait while the children’s clothes were organized, and the baby soothed, and decisions made about which children would go in which car and where they’d be taken. Had to wait and not speak—not that anyone would have spoken to him anyway. They moved around him like he wasn’t there, like disgrace had made him invisible.

  He just needed to get in the car with Deanna, was what he kept thinking—ride back with her, talk to her alone. This was easy enough, as it turned out; no one else offered to take him. But even after they had finally started to drive, he had to keep waiting while the little boy and the baby wailed in the backseat. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. The sky had turned an ugly bruised color along the horizon; the storm finally coming, maybe.

  “They asleep?” Deanna whispered, after a time.

  The crying had stopped, Jared realized. He turned around. The baby’s head was lolling; out cold. Even the toddler’s eyes were sealed shut; a few tears still clung to the lavender lids. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Good.”

  He could hear no animosity in her voice, no judgment. “D, I don’t know what happened back there,” he began in a rush. “I didn’t mean— I don’t know. It was just— That wasn’t me is what I’m trying to say.” A part of his brain noted her set face, the fact that she was not looking at him, but he stumbled on. “It was just, I don’t know, like an instinct or something. I mean, she came at me like—like some kind of animal, you know? And I just—”

  Deanna turned, and he saw that her wide eyes were blazing. “No, that was you, Jared,” she said. “You the animal.”

  He noted the shock moving through his body as though he were watching it happen to someone else. “I’m the animal?” he heard himself say. “She attacked me! I was just trying to do what you told me to. You said ‘get the baby’ and next thing I knew—”

  “You threw that child, Jared! Twice! I mean, maybe once, okay, ’cause you were startled or whatever. But twice?” She shook her head. “That was a child, Jared! A child!”

  There was no escaping the disgust in her voice, the condemnation.

  “So that’s what you think of me,” he said. “That’s who you think I really am.”

  “All I’m saying is that was you did that, Jared. That was you.”

  He looked out the window, unseeing. He knew he hadn’t meant any harm; he’d just reacted instinctively, to protect himself. Yet even this certainty seemed to be dissolving. He had hurt that little girl and everyone had seen it. A gray tide of despair rose in him.

  Deanna turned onto Dixwell Avenue. Newhallville. Jared gazed bitterly at the cheap little frame houses, the trash-strewn lots. People were sitting together on some of the porches, waiting for the storm, their dark skin bright with sweat. Once Jared had looked at such scenes with hunger and envy; then, later, in the fullness of his happiness with Eliana, his confidence about the future, he had ceased even to notice them. And now? What now? For it had come to him suddenly that he would have to tell Eliana. And when he told her, when she added this to the scene he’d made in IKEA, to the little she knew about his father—what then? In his mind’s eye, the future turned to ash.

  Suddenly, Deanna slammed on the brakes and he was thrown forward.

  “Jesus Lord!” she cried. Figures were flashing past the front of the hood. The van to their left fishtailed, brakes squealing, and Jared saw the three boys clearly; they were running toward the middle of the road. Young kids, barely into double digits. What Porsche’s sons would be in a few short years.

  “Jesus Lord!” Deanna said again, checking the rearview mirror to see if the children had woken up, her foot still on the brake. The van driver hadn’t moved either; he was rolling down his window, yelling something at the boys, who had stopped together on the double yellow line.

  They were dressed convict-style, Jared noticed, in sagging pants and overlarge T-shirts. Well, that was the future they were probably heading for anyway, he thought, grimly. Because really, what were their
chances? But oh, how bright they looked, how alive, as they laughed and called out to each other and bumped each other’s knuckles—how young and lithe and full of promise.

  Like he had been.

  A feeling rose in Jared’s throat, hard and raw and lumped as a fist. He glanced over at the traffic on the other side of the street. The cars were coming fast and way too close together; surely the boys would stay put. But no—they were leaning forward, they were getting ready to run.

  He watched, his breath balled in the back of his mouth, as they sprang into the road.

  THREE VIEWS OF A POND

  I

  She saw it in her mind’s eye: the sunken round of ice, the sloping white bank. There was no need to think of a method, no need to plan. She had said, “I will kill myself,” and immediately she saw it: the pond and the bridge, the black gap by the dam where the ice didn’t form.

  All these weeks, as she walked across campus, as she sat in the dining hall—measuring the trickle of skim milk into her coffee, eating half portions of salad—all this time some secret part of her had been scouting the landscape like a hungry animal, keen with purpose. She had decided this—she.

  An image came to her of her mother, holding her as a baby. It was a photo from the family album and inside its old-fashioned, scalloped edges her mother was young and smiling, her new baby wrapped tight in a blanket on her lap. A sweet, faultless little baby; a tiny girl. A sob swelled her throat. But it was too late, she had already decided. She stared in horror at the sun-filled quad outside her dorm room window. The shoveled paths, the bright face of the building across the way, even the light itself seemed to have turned away from her. A handful of birds flung up into the blue air and scattered.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  It had begun with her body. Or perhaps it hadn’t, she couldn’t quite remember, but it was in her body that she felt it. Her body was wrong, it was queer and crooked, misshapen in a thousand ways. She couldn’t keep track of them all, even looking in the mirror she couldn’t exactly tell. Sometimes she thought it was her hips (grotesquely curved) or her shoulders (huge like a man’s) or her full, almost gluttonous lips. Often, though, it was nothing she could pinpoint, it was just the instant sinking of her heart: She saw herself and she saw that she was wrong.

  She could feel it as she walked to class or in the dining hall when she stood in line with the normal, small, pretty girls. Even when she tried to joke there was a hideous undercurrent to her words, a darkness she saw reflected in the faces of those around her. (What was it Ana had said? “You are never seeming happy.”)

  She had tried to change. She made rules: no speaking unless spoken to; no negative comments; no more than two thousand calories a day. These were reasonable rules, limits normal people followed instinctively, but she broke them again and again. Her days were a series of battles. Getting dressed took a wrenching hour; even going to breakfast was an ordeal, a maze of choices she could not make. (Should she eat? And who could she sit with? And if she did, what would she say?) Moments of clarity were worse. Terrible truths came to her then, truths which, because they came calmly, were irrefutable. They don’t like you. Or, You will fail. Or, You will kill yourself. She was a black hole, a howling core of darkness, and she couldn’t hide it. At the library, for instance, when she had seen the young reference librarian laughing with a short-haired girl in the warm light of the desk lamp. She could have passed by; instead she’d walked over to them. She had a question—it was normal to have a question, she told herself—but when she began to speak, she saw the laughter slide off the librarian’s face.

  “Yes?” the woman said, her expression suddenly terrible, like a mask.

  “Criticism,” she blurted.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Um, criticism—for Frost?” she stumbled. It was not even a real question. She felt her face begin to burn. The other girl dropped her eyes.

  “I would recommend you look in the card catalog,” the librarian said, “under ‘F.’ ”

  Walking away, she’d heard a short, snorting laugh behind her. Or had she? It was a sound so precisely like her nightmares, she doubted it was real.

  She stood, now, at the window of her dorm room, her hands on her face. She could feel her fingers cradling her cheeks and her slack mouth and through her mouth the breath coming, shallow and quick. Two girls were walking down one of the paths in the quad, laughing. Their legs moved them toward each other and away, toward and away, as though they were connected by elastics.

  She, too, had walked down that path earlier. She looked back at herself across the vast distance of the day: a tiny, innocent figure walking to her Renaissance Drama class. Nothing had happened yet; it was just a morning, with the sun shining weakly through a lifting fog. Then, by the library, a young man in a ridiculous wool hat had turned and smiled at her. He leaned out and slipped something into the palm of her glove.

  “Look at it,” he said, his voice sudden and close.

  She had not intended to stop but as she brushed past him she felt her hair catch in the stubble on his face and she turned, startled, to see his blue eyes looking straight into hers. Something had leapt up in her then, frantic as a dog, and she had walked away quickly, the flyer creasing in her hand.

  “Tonight! The Iron Horse!” he’d called behind her. “Think about it!”

  She had a queasy feeling in her belly, as of two antithetical elements poisonously mixing. When the gray stone classroom building loomed before her, she turned off on a path that led back behind the library. She did not think or reason with herself, she simply went, weaving her way through the buildings back to her dorm room, where, with her door shut on the deserted hall, she took out the scissors and cut her hair to the scalp.

  That was why she’d been bald when Ana came to her door, bald with the blood just drying where the scissors had scraped, and her eyes still red from crying.

  “But, Leila,” Ana exclaimed, “you have cut all your hair!”

  The sound of her own name seemed to strike her like a slap. She had opened the door on impulse, without even glancing in the mirror, for the knock had sounded somehow like a reprieve. But now she felt Ana’s eyes on her, sharp as a sparrow’s, and she realized how she must look.

  “It is very short!” Ana said brightly, in her pretty Mexican accent.

  She nodded.

  “Maybe that is a fashion now?” Ana herself was wearing pressed khakis and a pink oxford shirt.

  “Maybe,” she said grimly.

  Ana looked down at the hall floor. “Well. I’m sure it will be . . . it will be looking very good.” She looked up again with a little toss of her head; her black hair swung out and back in its smooth, thick curve. She had come to invite her to a party. “A salsa party,” she said. “We will be having a piñata. Do you know what is a piñata?”

  Leila did not answer. She could feel herself disappearing under the bright rain of Ana’s words. A slow fury began to heat in her chest.

  “Well, it is very much fun,” Ana was saying. “It is an animal or even a star or something like that and it is of colored paper, very beautiful, and inside there is candy. So you take sticks and—you have a napkin around your eyes like this, you know?—and you take sticks and try to hit it. It is very fun. You will have to—”

  “No,” she said, looking straight at Ana through her monstrous red eyes.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m not coming.”

  A flash of something hard passed across Ana’s face. “I just thought it would make you feel happy, Leila,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest. “Because you are never seeming happy. You are never seeming happy and I wonder even do you want—”

  She shut the door so abruptly Ana had to step backward, and for a moment, as she leaned there with the knob pressing into her belly, she felt a wild urge to laugh. But then she saw what she had done.

  She thought of it now without emotion, this interaction that had convinced her to kill her
self. The crying, the cutting, the frenzy were all over. None of it mattered now. Outside, the two girls had disappeared; the paths were empty. As she watched, the birds settled on the snow near the steps and began pecking warily at the broken pieces of bread scattered there.

  After a time she realized that she was no longer thinking—her mind had fallen open like a hand worn out from gripping. She turned from the window and lay down, fully clothed, on the narrow bed.

  When she woke it was dark and her belly was sour and hollow. Hungry, she realized, and why not? She put on a baseball hat and slowly opened her door; the hall was clear. She went to the bathroom to wash her swollen face.

  The night air was cold. She felt it on her damp skin: the shock of it and then the fading of the shock as she walked, placing her feet with care on the icy path. There was no need to think, no need to worry. At the dining hall, she took a piece of fried chicken with her salad; the serving woman smiled at her. The vast room was deserted. It was Friday, she remembered; there was a French theme dinner at another hall.

  She ate by herself in a small pool of quiet by the window. The wooden chairs, the smell of hot food, the round, solid table surface filled her with relief. She felt sleepy and cleansed, like a child after a tantrum.

  You will have to get up very early so no one will see you, she thought. Her implacable, unappeasable mind.

  But there was no need to think of that yet. She stuck her hand out and hid the bloody string of the drumstick under her napkin. Outside, the sky was turning an electric blue. Later it would be black and she would see the stars, pinpricks of light in the dark flat of her window.

  II

  The pond was nearly invisible in the darkness, save for a gleam here and there where the light from the lamppost hit it. The noise of it, however, was all around her—splashing and rushing and burbling, a chorus of secret murmurings. It felt overstated, like her own presence there. She didn’t belong on campus anymore—she’d graduated the spring before—and yet she’d agreed to come back, for a dance in the old college boathouse on the other side of the pond. Or no, not agreed—proposed it herself. A mistake, she thought now.