Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  “They’re right there.” She began pointing down the row of new photos, each of a different shaggy, horned, decrepit-looking buffalo standing atop a grassless little hill in front of a cyclone fence. Unless it was the same buffalo.

  Laughing through a mouthful of bagel, Daniel said, “I meant your boys. Joe, Mack, Har—”

  “There’s Harry.” Aunt Ethel directed his gaze toward the farthest-right buffalo. “Sleepy-eyed and slow as ever. Here’s Joe. And see Mitchell, could he be any more of a cliché, do you think?”

  Baffled, Daniel followed his Aunt’s finger. This buffalo had one of its legs off the ground and its head lifted, gazing not at the grassless ground but through the fence.

  “Look at him,” Aunt Ethel said. “Still busy. Somewhere in that yard, some overwhelmed, mesmerized sheep dog just agreed to purchase the complete long-term care plus annuities package.”

  Daniel started to laugh again, but the expression on his aunt’s face stopped him. She wore the same loving smile she’d always leveled at him. But she was looking at the photographs.

  “Aunt Ethel. You’re naming your buffalo pictures?”

  “The buffalo, not the pictures.” Folding the book against her chest, Aunt Ethel gave a satisfied sigh. “And we didn’t name them, what are you talking about? Did you name Lisa?”

  “What?”

  “How is she, by the way? Oy vay, she’s been through so much. You both have. So young.”

  Laying the book on the couch and pinching his cheek, Aunt Ethel toddled out of the room with the empty orange juice jug. Daniel stared after her. It should have been funny. Just the latest of the thousand ways his aunt had found to flood her days with happier thoughts than her days seemed to merit. He wondered if she’d told Zippo. Somehow, he didn’t think Zippo would be amused.

  Daniel looked down at the hardback on the couch, and bent to pick it up. It had no cover. But a number of its pages had been dog-eared, and when Daniel flipped to the first, he found a passage highlighted in bright pink marker. “The Holy Spark that fell when God built and destroyed the worlds, man shall raise and purify, from stone to plant, from plant to animal. .. purify and raise the Holy Sparks that are imprisoned in the world of shells.” Next to the word “shells,” in the mock-parchment margins of the page, his aunt had drawn a smiley face.

  Not Dick Francis, then. He flipped the book on its spine and raised an eyebrow. He’d never known his Aunt to crack a Sidur in synagogue, let alone the Kabbalah in her home.

  “You’re going to have to come to the graves, okay?” Aunt Ethel said from the other room, and Daniel started.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Thursday’s cemetery day, remember? I’d be okay skipping, I mean, they’re not there anymore, but you know your other aunt. ‘A grave needs stones.’ So come with us, and afterwards we’ll go get coddies.”

  “Ugh,” Daniel murmured. “Is that even real fish in those things?”

  “What do you think the mustard’s for?”

  Daniel started to smile, but stopped halfway. He was looking at the buffalo. Remembering Mitchell coming home from work, which is pretty much all anyone remembered of Mitchell. Harry with the trains. Most of all, Mack, spooling jokes through endless dinners, teaching his Aunt to rumba on two replaced hips.

  For the first time in his life, he wondered if it had been a good idea coming here. He leaned forward to lay the book back on the couch, came face to face with the photograph of the buffalo with its leg in the air—Mitchell— and saw the cheetah for the first time.

  Had that been there a second ago? Had he really not noticed that?

  There it was, anyway, its nose to the gate of the fence in the background, one paw through the chicken wire. The blotchy, irregular spots on its fur looked more like mange than coloration, and there was an ugly pink patch above its back right haunch and another at the base of its neck.

  “Aunt Ethel?” he called. “About this cheetah...”

  “Mack?”

  “Mack?”

  The front door burst open, and Daniel swiveled toward it. From the tiny entranceway, he heard the scuffle of heavy boot heels, started to call a hello, but stopped when he heard the tremor in Zippo’s voice.

  “They’re out. Ethel, my God, they’re loose. All of them.”

  Daniel arrived just in time to see Aunt Ethel stumbling for the front closet, grabbing at the long, yellow overcoat she’d worn all of his life, and starting out the front door before Aunt Zip put a crooked, age-stained hand on her wrist.

  “Honey, you’re going to freeze.”

  With an annoyed glance at her shorts and t-shirt, Ethel hurried off down the back hallway toward her bedroom. That hallway, too, had always been lined floor to ceiling with family photographs, including a random series of Daniel at various ages, some of them with his parents. From where he was standing, Daniel could only see that there were still pictures. Had the one of his father been replaced, also? With orangutans, maybe?

  Was there even one of Lisa? Had he ever given Aunt Ethel one?

  Then Zippo’s hand was on his cheek, pulling his gaze around. Where Ethel was essentially a fire hydrant with hammer toes, Zippo loomed like a tall, bent oak. Whatever dye she used either never took or she kept washing it out, because her gauzy hair was mostly white tinged with blue.

  “Hello, Aunt Zip.” He leaned in to kiss her, but halted midway. “Aunt Zip? What is it?”

  Both of his aunts could produce tissues from mid-air the way magicians did coins. Almost always, the tissues were for others, but now Zippo dabbed at her own eyes. The orange eye-shadow on her lids looked caked and layered and permanent, like veins in sedimentary rock.

  “Nothing, sweetie,” she said. “It’s your silly old aunts. You look thin.”

  Even more unsettled, Daniel kissed her anyway. “It’s great to see you.”

  “Oh, Daniel. I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with all this again. So soon after your dad, I mean. It’s not fair.”

  “It’s never fair,” Daniel said quietly. “Isn’t that what you taught my mom?”

  “Yes.” Aunt Zippo’s face had long since begun to cave in, the nose sinking into its cavity and the mouth losing shape, and there were red, spidery blotches everywhere. She looked like a cherry pie. With whip cream hair. She dabbed once more with the tissue. The tissue vanished. “But I meant for me.” With that singular smile that always looked half-melted, almost all mouth-turned-down, Zippo touched his cheek. Daniel felt simultaneously near tears and buoyed.

  The Angel of Mercy. The Worst Luck in the World.

  Ethel rumbled back into the entryway, and Aunt Zippo clucked.

  “What?” Ethel snapped. “Let’s go. Daniel, you’re driving.”

  Ethel hadn’t changed her top or her shorts. But she’d somehow yanked on yellow winter tights and a long-sleeved thermal undershirt beneath them. Feeling a surprising grin creep onto his lips, Daniel followed his aunts out the front door into the icy morning.

  He actually had to hurry to get to the car before them and flip the locks. Before he could do it for her, Ethel had somehow bent low enough on her creaking hips to pull the passenger seat-lever and climb into the back.

  “Ethel, I’ll sit there,” Zippo said.

  “Oh, be quiet, you’re too tall.” Ethel yanked the seat into position in front of her. “Come on, Daniel.”

  “Ladies. Would either one of you like to tell me where we’re going?”

  For an astonishing moment, even Zippo looked exasperated with him. “The farm, honey. Where do you think?”

  “The farm. Right. Either of you want to tell me which...” But he realized that he knew. At the same moment, he also realized what had seemed so strange about the buffalo on their hill. Other than the fact that there were photographs of them on his aunt’s wall.

  He’d seen those buffalo. Knew that hill.

  “Buddy’s Farm,” he said.

  “Of course, Buddy’s Farm,” Ethel snapped, “let’s—”

&n
bsp; “Oh,” said Zippo, and moved off toward the white Le Sabre parked a good five yards behind Daniel’s car and another five from the curb.

  “Zippo!” Ethel called.

  Ignoring her sister, Zippo leaned into her front seat and returned with a white baker’s box wrapped in bowed white twine. She handed Daniel the box before circling the car and lowering herself into the passenger seat.

  “That couldn’t have waited until we got back?” Ethel asked as Daniel keyed the ignition.

  “Daniel’s here.” Zippo smiled that upside down, half-melted smile and patted his leg. “Daniel gets chocolate tops.”

  The shudder that rippled across his shoulders startled him. At least it passed quickly. “Thank you, Aunt Zip,” he said. He started to wrestle with the twine, and Zippo clucked and took the box from him and neatly unpicked the knot.

  “Let’s go,” Ethel barked.

  Mostly, Daniel knew the way, though he couldn’t remember driving to Buddy’s Farm himself before. In fact, he didn’t even think he’d been there in at least ten years. The sun had slipped through the cloud cover, though its light served only to turn the dead grass and the bare trees whiter. He started to turn right, Ethel corrected him with a clipped, “No,” and Zippo began pushing random buttons trying to tune his radio.

  “What do you want to hear?” Daniel asked through a mouthful of thick, fudgy frosting from the cookie Aunt Zip had practically stuffed between his lips. “Don’t know if I’ve got any big Xave, but—”

  “The news, honey. The update. Hurry.”

  The hurt in Zippo’s voice—and even more, that low trill of panic— alarmed Daniel all over again. He punched the Band button and got a talk station, expecting weather, traffic, the usual babble. Instead, there it was.

  “The National Guard has been activated,” the reporter’s voice was panting. “Once again, residents of Pikesville, Sudbrook Park, and Woodholme are asked to stay indoors and off the roads. And if you’re driving on the beltway, until these animals are located and secured please use extreme caution, and be aware that there may be substantial delays.”

  “Even more substantial than usual,” laughed the throaty, in-the-studio host, and Daniel stared at the dial.

  “What the hell?” he said, and the first sirens screamed behind him.

  He barely had time to pull to the gravel shoulder before a train of police cars rocketed past. In the window of the last, Daniel glimpsed a deputy loading a long, black rifle.

  “Oh my God,” he murmured, turning toward his aunts. “Did you see...”

  But they had seen. He could tell by the looks on their faces. Ethel’s eyes had gone steely, her mouth firm and flat. Even more disconcerting was the way Zippo dropped her head into the folds of her shawl and hugged her arms around herself.

  “Maybe we should go home,” he said. Neither aunt answered.

  Checking the rearview mirror multiple times, Daniel edged back onto the street. A helicopter whirred past overhead. Cautiously, Daniel turned the radio lower. When neither of the aunts objected, he turned it off. They drove in silence for a while.

  “Hurry up,” Ethel murmured, though her tone lacked its usual barking cheerfulness.

  On both sides of them, the houses vanished. The road cut through crop-less farm fields now, divided only by stands of oak and elm, a few half-hearted wooden fences.

  “So,” Daniel finally said, if only to break the strangely pregnant silence. “I guess Buddy still lives there?”

  “He still does,” Zippo said.

  “And he still keeps random animals, just for fun? Buffalo? Cheetahs? Remember when he had that elephant? How is he even allowed to have animals like that? Ooh, remember those hairless alpaca or whatever they were, and—”

  “They’re our animals,” Ethel said, and smacked the backseat. “Goddamn him.”

  “Yours?”

  “We’re sponsoring them,” Zippo said. “Ethel and I. Buddy’s their caretaker.”

  “Some care,” Ethel snapped, and Zippo shushed her.

  Then, abruptly, they’d arrived. Daniel recognized the hillside with its sagging cyclone fence, and the prickly ash tree with the forked trunk and the bare branches curling in on each other like clawed fingers on an arthritic hand. The parked police cruiser with its rooftop light-bars flashing was another clue. By the time he’d brought the car to a stop on the gravel, Aunt Zippo had her door open, and Ethel was practically pushing her from the car.

  “Hold on,” Daniel said. “They’re not just going to let you...”

  But both of them were out, now, and Aunt Ethel had already lumbered to the top of the long drive that dropped through the field of dead grass to the farmhouse. A burly police kid with shoulders roughly the width of the tire axle on his cruiser had stood to block her. He wasn’t really a kid, Daniel realized as he hurried forward. Just a whole lot younger than Ethel or Zippo. His black night stick and the holster of his gun bumped against his leg.

  “You’re going to escort me?” Aunt Ethel was saying. “They really are teaching better manners at the academy these days.”

  The cop—blond, probably not even thirty, cheeks flushed with the cold— just stared at the bobbing, flame-haired bird-woman in front of him. Ethel was several steps past before he recovered himself and stepped into her path again.

  “Are you telling me you didn’t notice the police cars?” the cop said, folding his arms. “The helicopters everywhere? Lady, you really ought to turn on your radio.” He reached out, intending to steer her firmly back up the hill.

  “What? Son, I don’t hear so well.”

  Somehow, she’d got by him again. Beside Daniel, Zippo sighed and moved to follow her sister. A nervous tremor twitched in Daniel’s throat, and he hurried after them.

  The cop had moved to grab Aunt Ethel’s arm again. Only when she glared at his hand did he think better of it. From across the fields, somewhere on the other side of the hickory forest that bordered Buddy’s farm, a siren wailed. Answering wails and their echoes flooded the air, as though a wolf pack had materialized in those trees.

  Which, all things considered, didn’t seem so improbable.

  “Look. Ma’am,” said the cop. “You can’t go down there.”

  “Why, did Buddy warn you about us?”

  The cop stared again. Ethel waddled off with Zippo right behind her. By the time Daniel reached the policeman, he was staring down at his own hands. There was a chocolate top cookie in them. The policemen looked up and Daniel shrugged, started to smile.

  “They’re going to get hurt. Laugh about that,” said the policeman, and returned to his car.

  Daniel had just reached the bottom of the drive when Buddy himself came around the side of the farmhouse with a hose and a slop-bucket. His glasses really were as outsized as Daniel remembered them, ballooning from his sockets as though his eyes were blowing bubbles. His paunch had swelled and sagged, and his still-thick hair had finished draining of color. He took one goggle-eyed look at Ethel and dropped the bucket.

  “Aw, Christ, now my morning really is complete. I thought it was complete before, but now it’s perfect.”

  “You let them out,” Ethel snarled, and Daniel all but ran to reach her side. Never in his life had he heard Aunt Ethel snarl. At anyone.

  They’re going to get hurt.

  Ethel was still snarling. “You let them go.”

  Flinching, Buddy lifted the hose. Daniel really thought he might blast them, started to lunge into the path of the spray. “Let them?” Buddy shouted back. “Let them?”

  “How does this happen? What do you pay your fence guy for? With our money.”

  “It was that goddamn cat.” Buddy was looking at Daniel now. Pleading, Daniel realized. He fell back a step. “That fucking cheetah.”

  “There’s no need for that sort of talk,” Zippo said quietly.

  “He got the lock off, don’t ask me how. Pushed open the gate. I saw him do it. But by the time I got out here...” Waving his free hand in front o
f his bubble eyes, Buddy the Exotic Animal Farmer seemed to sag into his skin. “Look, I’m the one in trouble. Big trouble. So just...”

  But Ethel was shaking her head, staring at her feet. And smiling now. “Oh, Mack,” she said.

  “Where did they go?” Aunt Zippo asked.

  Buddy shrugged, seeming to sag more but also puff out, like a pillow being smacked and fluffed. He gestured with the hose toward the woods. “Mostly that way.”