Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  “Mostly?”

  “That’s where the cops are. They’re worried about that elementary school over there. One of them broke straight off that direction, though.” Buddy waved behind the house. “Toward the beltway.”

  “Which one?” Ethel asked.

  Buddy’s head rolled up out of his neck wrinkles. Behind his glasses, the magnified frog-eyes blinked.

  “What?”

  “Which one? Who headed for the beltway?”

  “Which one? Lady. They’re buffalo.”

  “You’re thinking Mitchell,” Aunt Zippo said, and Ethel nodded.

  “Be just like him, wouldn’t it? First chance he gets, straight for the office.”

  Without another word, his aunts set off side by side, not back up the path but around the side of the house toward the woods. Buddy just stared after them. But when Daniel moved to follow, the farmer grabbed his wrist.

  “Watch them, okay? They’re going to get shot.”

  For a second, Daniel thought he meant the buffalo. But those eyes were trained on his aunts. And Buddy’s other hand kept banging the bucket nervously against his own leg. Daniel nodded, and the farmer let go.

  In the woods, sirens screamed again. His aunts had already gotten a surprising distance down the slope toward the forest, and they’d linked arms. Ethel had her head on Zippo’s shoulder, so that her red hair and the wool shawl blended into a sort of mane. They moved in lurches through the winter light, the birdless, silent morning, and Daniel felt his breath catch, hard, and shook his head to fight back the black thoughts.

  “Aunt Ethel,” he called. “Aunt Zip. Stop.”

  But they didn’t stop. Indeed, they seemed to gain speed, like fallen leaves the wind had caught. He started to call again, but didn’t want to draw the attention of the ghost-wolves in the woods. Or the very real policemen with the shotguns. He started to run.

  He caught his aunts just as they drifted through the tree line, and they looked surprised to see him.

  “Daniel, what is it, honey?” Aunt Zip said, but he couldn’t answer. Aunt Ethel patted his arm.

  They stepped together into a hollow, empty silence. No ground animals rustled the dead leaves here. The trees stood farther apart than they’d looked from the farmhouse—this was more an orchard than a wood—and daylight lay between the trunks like white paper where something had been erased. Daniel watched the steam of his breath coalesce momentarily and then evaporate, leaving more blank places.

  “Listen,” Aunt Ethel hissed.

  Sirens shattered the quiet, and Daniel ducked and threw his gloves over his ears as his aunts clinched together. This time, the answering echoes seemed much closer.

  “That way,” said Aunt Zippo, the moment the wailing stopped.

  “Both of you, wait,” Daniel said. “This isn’t a joke. They’ve got guns.”

  “Joke?” said Aunt Ethel. “Got any good ones? No one’s told me a good one since Mack died.”

  “Except my father,” Daniel murmured.

  “You mean the goat? Oy.” She shuffled away through the leaves. Zippo followed, and again their speed surprised Daniel. He had to hurry to keep up.

  “Aunt Zip,” he said. “We’re going to get shot.”

  “Honey, why would they shoot us?”

  “See the hair?” Aunt Ethel was gesturing at her own head but only half-turning. “If I could grow enough of this, I could sell it as a hunting jacket. Hurry up.”

  “We’re coming, dear,” Aunt Zip said, and they both moved ahead of him again.

  Through the trees a considerable way ahead, Daniel thought he could see chain-link, fence, and he also heard voices.

  Aunt Ethel somehow moved faster still. In the path, they came across a steaming pile of shit. The smell burrowed straight up Daniel’s nostrils, and he gagged.

  “What?” said Aunt Zippo,

  He pointed at the ground. “Can’t you smell that?”

  “I can’t smell anything anymore. I miss smells.”

  “Trust me. You don’t miss this one.”

  “You wouldn’t think so.”

  “Is it buffalo?”

  Aunt Ethel should have been too far ahead to hear. But she slapped a hand to her forehead and said, “Oh, brother.” In her tights, on her stick-legs, she looked like a little girl dressed as a crone. Or a clown. She couldn’t really get shot, Daniel thought. Anyone who got her in his rifle sights would be too busy laughing.

  “I’m worried about her,” he whispered.

  Beside him, Zippo sighed. Her shallow breath barely made an imprint on the air. “She’s just old, honey. The way we all get. If we’re lucky.”

  “Yeah, but she’s different. Acting different.”

  Without slowing, Zippo looked her sister up and down. “She looks pretty much like Ethel to me.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s changed her reading habits.”

  “Her reading habits?”

  “All my life, she’s read Dick Francis. Pretty much only Dick Francis.”

  “Have a cookie, Daniel,” Aunt Zippo said.

  He had no idea from where she produced the chocolate top, or how she’d managed to keep the dollop of frosting from getting smashed.

  “Aunt Zippo, she’s naming the buffalo.”

  “She didn’t name them.” It was her voice, not her words, that prickled in Daniel’s chest. She sounded dreamy, or maybe just distant, as though settling into that detachment that supposedly comes for the old at the end and makes dying easier. Except that his mother had always said that was bullshit. A bedtime story people told their children as they watched the life leave their parents. Daniel felt tickling in his tear ducts again. He thought of his father, his lost uncles, and was overcome by an urge to grab his aunts’ crooked, cold hands and hug them to his chest. He took one of Zippo’s, tugged her forward to where Ethel had stopped, and came out of the trees into sight of the schoolyard.

  Then he dropped Zippo’s hand and stared straight ahead.

  It was like being at a Natural History Museum. Like looking through glass at a diorama full of stuffed dead things.

  There was the section of fence, first of all, trampled into the ground. Half a dozen police knelt in a ring around the perimeter of the schoolyard with their rifles aimed through the links in the remaining chicken wire. The lights from their cruisers flung splashes of red, like paint ball blotches, across their otherwise colorless faces and the dead grass and the hunkered, gray brick of the school building thirty yards away and the whimpering, teary-eyed children clutching each other by the swing sets. Between the children and the school, their shaggy flanks heaving as they panted and chuffed and lowered their horny heads, four full-grown buffalo bumped around and against each other and expelled geysers of breath into the freezing air.

  “Oh, no,” Ethel said. “Oh, boys.”

  How long, Daniel wondered, had this scene been frozen like this? He could see what had happened. The recess bell ringing. The sound startling the buffalo, who’d rumbled right through the fence, smack in between this last group of straggling kids and the safety of their classroom.

  On the blacktop, Daniel saw two teachers and a towering African American man in pinstripes gesturing furiously at each other, the kids, the cops. All along the fence, walkie-talkies spit static and snatches of hard, unintelligible instruction.

  “Harry?” the African American man called abruptly, and both Ethel’s and Zippo’s heads jerked toward the buffalo. The same buffalo, Daniel noticed, the one farthest to the right with his nose in the grass and the broken tip of his horn jutting toward them like a shiv.

  But the man was talking to one of the kids. And the kid was lifting his red hood off his ears. He was maybe eight, blond-haired, with chipmunk cheeks that would have amused either of Daniel’s aunts for weeks on end if they could have gotten their pinching fingers on them. He wiped a hand across his tear-streaked face and waited.

  “Just walk this way, son,” the pinstripe man was saying. “Around the fence the
re. Come to us. Harry, lead them this way. All of you, now. Come on.”

  None of the children moved. In the center of the yard, the buffalo stamped. One of them knocked horns with its closest neighbor, though the gesture looked accidental to Daniel. More like two old men bumping into one another with walkers than rutting.

  Then the kid in the hood moved. The moment he did, the buffalo with the broken horn looked up, snorted loudly, and raked its foot along the grass. Instantly, rifles leapt to shoulders as the cops locked in, and the buffalo froze, sweeping its gaze once across the whole assembled mass before him. It chuffed again, pawed more frantically, and tore a huge hunk of dirt out of the lawn.

  “Damn it,” spat a nearby radio.

  Harry—the kid, not the animal—burst into fresh tears. Half a dozen safety catches popped free on half a dozen guns. Daniel was so busy watching the police that he didn’t notice Aunt Zippo moving until she was halfway across the yard.

  “Jesus,” a policeman yelled. “Someone grab her!”

  But Aunt Zippo had already reached the herd, and as Daniel’s mouth dropped open, she disappeared amongst them.

  Even the children went silent. Around the old woman, the buffalo began to pant and paw nervously. One of them bumped her with its flank, and Daniel saw her stagger and get bumped by another and almost go down amidst their stamping feet. The one with the pointed half-horn had moved into the circle, now, and it was poking at Aunt Zippo with its head lowered and its front foot working furiously at the grass.

  For one more moment, the unreality held. Daniel stared at the animals snorting around his aunt, alternately ignoring her and then brandishing horns and banging themselves against her. The eeriest thing wasn’t their presence. It was their physicality. Their breath and their scraped, hairy sides and their deep-set, black-brown eyes and the way their skin seemed draped over their skulls rather than attached to it, as though they were already skeleton and hide, and there was something else, something not-buffalo, underneath there.

  His aunts’ faces, Daniel realized, looked the same way. Everyone’s did. His father’s. His wife’s. Hell, even his own face. Our features little more than cloaks life shrugs on while it camps inside us.

  Somewhere to his right, a walkie-talkie crackled. Rifles shifted, held. Ethel was just staring, her hands over her mouth. Daniel threw his arm around her shoulder, squeezed once.

  “I’ll get her,” he said.

  “Oh, God,” said his aunt.

  Then he was through the fence, flinging up his hand, screaming, “Wait! Don’t shoot!”

  “Hold fire!” someone shouted.

  Two guns exploded. Daniel ducked, whirled, waved a frantic hand, and broke into a run as the kids screeched and bolted for the blacktop. Over the tops of the nearest buffalo, Daniel could see his Aunt’s orange shawl, the back of her head with its thinning, blue-white hair like a cloud coming apart. The head disappeared as his aunt went down.

  “No!” Daniel screamed, and the buffalo broke as one into a plunging, sideways dash toward the far end of the schoolyard, away from the children and the blacktop and the mass of muzzles and threatening faces.

  All of them, that is, except the one with the horn. Harry. He had slid, with surprising grace, onto his front knees. Aunt Zippo was kneeling beside him. The buffalo seemed to hover there a moment, and then slipped the rest of the way to the grass.

  Aunt Zippo laid, both her hands on the animal’s throat, under its mane. Its great black hooves had splayed to either side of her, and blood bubbled from the holes in its gut and over Zippo’s gloves.

  “Ssh,” she was saying, in that hypnotic, even cadence she seemed to have been born with, or maybe just learned through too much practice. So many years of practice. “Ssh, Harry.” She never looked up, not once. She just kept whispering, over and over, until the buffalo died.

  * * * *

  It took hours, after that, for the truck to come, and for the animal wranglers to wrestle the surviving bison into it. By the time Daniel and his aunts got back to Ethel’s, it was too late to drive home, and he was too shaken, anyway. Ethel ordered pineapple pizza, which Daniel barely touched but which his aunts devoured. Ethel burst into tears once, and Zippo sat beside her and said, “I know. I know.”

  “How many times?” Ethel sobbed, swiping at her cheeks and smearing pizza grease there.

  Producing yet another of her magic tissues, Zippo wiped the grease away. “There doesn’t seem to be a limit.”

  “You know, I still miss him the most. Harry.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t love him the most. He pretty much slept and worked and built Herm’s trains with him and wouldn’t let us eat donuts enough. But I miss him the most.”

  “He was the first,” Zippo said.

  “Don’t eat that last pineapple,” Ethel said, and snatched the final pizza slice from the box. Abruptly, she looked up at Daniel, held the slice toward him. “Unless you want it, honey.”

  Daniel shook his head, closed his eyes, saw skeleton-flashes of white light, like the projected shadows of a CAT-scan. When he opened his eyes, his aunts were holding hands.

  Zippo went home, and Ethel set him up in her son Herm’s old room with the train bedspread still draped over the bed. Daniel read a Dick Francis novel until well after midnight because he didn’t think he could sleep, nodded off with the book on his chest, and woke up weeping.

  He didn’t think he’d called out, but his Aunt was at the door within seconds anyway, in a pink nightgown that had to have been at least thirty years old, and with what looked like a matching bonnet on her head. She didn’t sshhim—that was Zippo’s purview—but she asked several times if he wanted a bagel, and she clucked a lot, and in the end she sat on the edge of the bed and patted his hand, over and over.

  “How do you do it, Aunt Ethel?” Daniel asked, through tears he couldn’t seem to stop. “How do you survive the love you outlive?”

  Aunt Ethel just patted his hand, glanced around the room, out toward the hallway, still lined with photos of the families she’d created or joined, the children she’d borne and the families they’d formed. The hallway was also where she’d moved the pictures of the men she and her sister had buried, after replacing them in the living room with the buffalo.

  “I know what Mack would have said,” she told him.

  “What?”

  ‘“Did you hear the one about the rabbi and the stripper?’“

  That just made Daniel sob harder. When he’d gotten control of himself again, he looked at his aunt. “What about you, Aunt Ethel?”

  “Me?” She shrugged. “Mostly, hon, I think I just keep deciding I want to.”

  It was a long while before the tears stopped completely and Daniel felt ready to lie back on his pillow. Ethel brought him warm milk, and he actually drank it. And it was after two when he awoke the second time, to the sound of the porch door swinging open.

  Instantly, he was bolt upright. “Aunt Ethel?” he called. Grabbing his pants off the chair, he hurried down the darkened hallway, through the living room onto the screened-in porch. The side-yard lights were on, flooding the tiny yard.

  Ethel was by the screen. Fifteen yards away, right where the grass disappeared into the stand of pines that marked the edge of her property, the cheetah crouched on its haunches, its tail whapping at the dirt. In life, even more than in its photo, the thing looked ancient, its yellow eyes rheumy, its fur discolored or missing entirely. It also had its disconcertingly tiny head cocked, its mouth open, and one front paw crossed over the other. There was something almost cocky in the pose. Composed, at the very least. Like a gentleman caller.

  “Oh my God,” Daniel mumbled. “How on earth did it...”

  “Mack’s home,” his aunt said, and glanced just once over her shoulder at Daniel.

  “What?” But he was thinking of the buffalo on the wall. The ones Ethel and Zippo both insisted they hadn’t named, just called by name. “Aunt Ethel, that isn’t...”

&
nbsp; Smiling, she stepped out the door.

  It was those next, fleeting moments Daniel would remember, years later, at Lisa’s three-years-clean checkup, and again at her five years, when the doctors told her she didn’t need to come back every six months anymore, she just had to stay vigilant, always. Or at least, it was those moments he would focus on. Not what came afterward. From then on, when he let himself think about this night, he would picture his aunt’s bare, gnarled feet in the grass. Her lumbering gait as she approached the cheetah, which hunched, coiled, its purr—or growl—audible even from the house. The pink bonnet on her head, the yellow overcoat on her shoulders, and the swing of her hand off her hip that told him she was dancing.