Magnetic Field(s)

by Ron Loewinsohn

  He looked around for something to throw, but he could not see anything but a couple of potted plants sitting on the railing of the deck. He would have thrown them both if he could have been sure of hitting them, but he knew he would not be able to explain that to Jane. He saw a trowel and a weeding fork, which might have made good weapons, but they were too short. He went back inside and pulled the broom out of the closet, but after he hefted it he put it back. Too light. He picked up Danny’s baseball bat and as he went back through the kitchen he saw the pans hanging against the wall and grabbed two of them. When he got to the back door, he looked out through the glass. One of them had actually come up onto the deck. God damn!

  He opened the door and stomped his foot on the redwood planks. The raccoon stopped and turned toward him, looking as if it had not yet made up its mind whether to teach this fool a lesson or let it slide for now, but figuring it’d just better keep an eye on him.

  Stomp! “Scoot! Get the hell out of here!”

  Nothing.

  He put the bat down where it would be in easy reach and grabbed the two pans by their handles. He clanged the bottoms of the pans together several times. The animal ducked and stayed crouched, low to the floor, looking as if it could just as easily rush him as make a run for it. Its eyes were cold and hard behind its mask. Absolutely disdainful. The two in the fish pond were now sitting upright, watching him closely. Even as they looked at him, one of them scooped down into the water again and brought its dripping paw up to its mouth.

  He suddenly realized that he had lost track of the one on the roof. That one might have leaped down on him from behind. He looked behind him quickly, but to do that he had to take his eye off the one in front of him. He backed into the laundry-room door, where he stood for a moment in a frustrated rage. He did not want to tell Jane or Danny. He was going to teach these fucking animals a lesson, though. They could not come barging in like this, and just take over his backyard. This was his property. This was the city, damn it!

  He wished he owned a shotgun. But if he did he would be shooting into McCormack’s yard. Even if he didn’t hit a person or a window, he would sure as hell leave pellets all over McCormack’s wall.

  The raccoon was now shitting on the deck. Oh, you son of a bitch! He had never felt anything like this rush of frustrated hatred before; he wanted to kill.

  He went quickly to the hall closet next to the front door and got Danny’s bow. By the time he got back to the laundry room, he had it strung and was hanging the quiver of steel-tipped arrows over his shoulder. The cats were peering out from behind the washing machine.

  He looked out through the back door.

  Nothing.

  He opened the door and checked the roof line. He thought he saw a shape, but it did not move for a long time, so he walked out, grabbing the baseball bat as he went out to the middle of the deck where the one on the roof would not be able to jump him from behind.

  The two were now climbing out of the fish pond, and even though they were not crouching behind it they were not giving him much of a target. He could not see the other two, though he could hear them moving around in the dark bushes just beyond the patio. They were out there, he knew, and these two, just sitting there, their heads showing above the tile of the fish pond. He threw the bat at them. It sailed about two feet over their heads. They did not even bother to duck, though they flinched and tensed up again when they heard the bat hit the ground some fifteen feet beyond them.

  The smell of the raccoon shit made him even more furious. He wanted to kill them all, thinking it was a shame the burglar-alarm system couldn’t have been rigged up with some sort of electrified fence or something so that now he could turn it on and chase them into it and watch them fry as they hit the wire. He pulled one of the arrows out of the quiver and set its notch in the string, holding its shaft on the grip with one finger. Now he was exulting that he had practiced this all summer. He knew he had a tendency to pull his bow hand up and slightly to the right just at the moment of release, so he aimed low, just at the tile rim of the fish pond. The bigger of the two animals was crouching now just beyond that rim. The arrow would hit it just below the eye, on the snout; the steel tip would pierce the bone of the skull and continue on through the brain and would probably come out again just below the back of its neck. The body of this one, as it looked at him, in full face, was so thick, so complicatedly thick, and the arrow would have to go through all those layers of skin and bone and organs. The other one was sitting now sideways, showing him its profile. He could feel his heart pounding with fierce joy, and felt somewhat annoyed to see how the steel tip of the arrow was moving around jerkily as he moved in his nervousness trying to take aim. He thought, You’ve got to keep your cool.

  “No,” he said aloud, putting down the bow. “This is crazy.” He thought, I’m not Daniel Boone. I’m not some Indian defending his hogan against all the terrors of the wild. This is San Francisco. He was overreacting. He had been ripped off and had his territory invaded. And now these little animals with their cartoon burglar masks like the Beagle Boys, how could he want—so intensely, so madly—to kill them? They only wanted, they wanted things. They were hungry. Of course they reminded him of that burglar. Albert. Yet he too had had some kind of style, strolling into the lineup booth. He would have shat on the floor too, probably. Why not? What must it have been like to be Albert, tiptoeing into somebody’s backyard and getting in through the back door? What must it have been like to hear your own breathing and your own heartbeat there in the space where other people had their lives? The two raccoons moved away now, back toward the darkness, as he laid down the bow. What must it be like to have your being like that, furtively, like an animal, and to come into a yard, like this one, and be suddenly confronted by a dog that would give you away by its barking? You would have to kill it. That must have been the hard part, killing the animals.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ron Loewinsohn was born in the Philippines and educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard University. He is the author of five books of poetry, among them Watermelons (1959), L’Autre (1967), and Goat Dances (1976). He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Stone Award of the Academy of American Poets, a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship, a Harvard Graduate Prize Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Berkeley, California. Magnetic Fieid(s) is his first novel.

  The original version of this book was made available by the Internet Archive.