Paul Steatham petted his beard and smiled, eyes glittering.
Rusty mumbled, “That guy’s smoked a few joints in his life.”
His mother, right behind us, said, “Russell Scalisi, if you embarrass me in front of these teachers, I’ll sell the television.”
Paul, with the beard, explained that the animals on the island were originally native to Georgia. He spoke of extinction as if it was a clattering machine that might someday crush our own fingers. Because his voice was deep and rich, an axe thunking a tree stump, everyone listened. He asked us to stay on the trails and be quiet and not to tease the animals.
“These creatures aren’t completely wild,” he said, “because we feed them and they’re used to seeing people. But they aren’t pets. Some may eventually be released into the wild. They can be dangerous, okay? Now who’s got a question?” He set his hands on his hips.
Eric Johnson, who was going to be a doctor like his father, raised his hand up stiff.
“Yessir,” Paul said.
“What are the animals here used for?”
Paul pinched his beard and stroked it. “Nothing. They’re not much use to us in our technological world. On the other hand, we’re not much use to them either.” His eyes crinkled at Eric, and his voice mellowed. “That was a good question, man. This island is just sort of an ark, I guess.”
Ascension beamed. “It’s our duty to preserve and protect God’s creatures.” Paul nodded.
Tim grabbed Rusty’s shoulder and stood on tiptoe. “Do these animals of yours have souls? We’re taught that they don’t. Do you believe that?”
Sister Rosaria turned. She had on her harlequin glasses now. Her beakish nose pointed at Tim.
The man rolled his head and showed his bristly throat and chuckled in polite embarrassment. “I can’t answer that one. Depends on your point of view. A Native American would say they have souls. I do know they’re incapable of sin. Even when an animal kills, it’s in innocence. Maybe they don’t need souls.” His eyes slid towards the teachers. He grinned. They smiled back, relaxed and charmed, except for Rosaria, who had reddened. She was coming our way.
“He’s one of us,” Tim said.
Rosaria pinched Tim’s earlobe from behind, yanking it down so hard Tim smacked to his knees, and I wondered if she’d seen our awful comic book. The nun’s teeth clenched, coffee-stained.
“Mr. Sullivan,” she said, “you just stay beside me today. Any more cleverness and you will not graduate. Do you understand?” She jerked the earlobe for emphasis.
Tim stood up but kept his head cocked to ease the pull. He looked at Mrs. Barnes. She opposed physical punishment. Mrs. Barnes diverted her glance to Rusty’s mother, who was frowning at us.
“You’re a very small boy,” said Rosaria, who was very small herself. She released the ear with a tug. “You’ll probably be tiny all your life. You should compensate with intelligence and generosity, not rebellion and clownishness.”
Tim hated himself for being small. He hung from the monkey bars for fifteen minutes every day, to stretch himself. Even a friendly mention of his height made him rabid. I knew he would get himself suspended now. I waited for the fireball of four-letter words. It was conceivable that he’d slap her face. But he only said, “Yes, Sister, I’m sorry. I was showing off.” He swallowed hard.
She said something only he could hear and smirked kindly. Tim was even smaller now, a drooping of the shoulders, downcast eyes. As we walked along, he gradually drifted away from her, and Rosaria fell in with the teachers at the back. Tim was quiet beside me.
Paul guided us into the trees. Dead branches laid end to end marked the sides of the trail. We passed a pool of water, the surface solid with mulchy leaves and a dusting of new pollen. Frogs chirped and plunked in before we saw them. Melissa Anderson tightened a bow in her hair and asked if there were any snakes around.
Charles Sapp, our class reptile expert, sneered, “No, snakes only live in storybooks, Melissa.”
Therese Parker, the girl with the pet raccoon, smiled adoringly.
Paul said, “Yes, please don’t bother the snakes, girls.”
Twigs and leaves crunched underfoot. I imagined I was an Indian and tried to walk silently, but couldn’t. The trail ran under pines and mossy oaks and magnolias. Several of the boys found sticks to carry. The teachers kept telling us to stay on the trail. The girls clumped together in the center and pretended to be frightened, except for Therese Parker, who kept squatting at the edges to cluck at squirrels.
Birds squawked down at us or crackled through the dead leaves. The dullest of them, the mockingbirds, whistled and chirped and trilled as if they were trying to make us believe there were hundreds of them.
Sister Ascension walked at the front with Paul, her bulk filling the trail by half. Paul took slow steps to stay beside her. The breeze lifted her powder-blue veil, exposing the hair on the back of her head. At the rear, the teachers and Mrs. Scalisi all said how pretty it was, smiling up at the treetops, taking greedy breaths while diamonds of sunlight slid across their faces.
We crowded clattering onto a wooden bridge that spanned a marsh. Minnows flickered in the water holes. Rusty leaned out over the railing and turned his head from side to side. Suddenly he pointed right beneath the bridge. “There’s an alligator!”
And then we could see it, a fat alligator basking at the edge of a water hole. The girls drew back to the other side of the bridge and clung to each other, tittering. The boys pressed against the rail, mouths open, clutching sticks. At the far end, a drainpipe splattered water out of an embankment. Charles Sapp calmly said, “There’s another one,” and aimed his finger at the marsh grass.
A huge gator, mud-gray, lay in the sun like a crusty statue. Near the drainpipe, behind him, a squirrel buzzed and fluffed its tail, and we wondered how many of them the gators got.
Paul began telling us about alligators, that they were related to the dinosaurs, to birds too, and like magic, like your eyes adjusting in a darkened room, a dozen of them materialized before us without any movement, sprawled in the mud, in the grass, or reduced to nostrils and eyes on the water’s skin. Two orange and yellow babies, thin as snakes, slipped into the near pool. Paul made a soft oof-sound and cupped his hands around it, and the baby gators answered in the same voice. The girls moved closer for a peek.
Donny Flynn said the big ones looked rubber. He wanted proof they could move. He took some pennies from his pocket and cranked his arm back, enclosed in a plaster cast, but Mrs. Barnes said, “Don’t you dare,” before he could launch them.
Paul led us to a fence enclosing a stretch of pines and scrub. A little creek fed into a pool near the fence. As we stood there, five deer appeared. If you didn’t concentrate, they vanished into the color of the woods, and you had to wait for the slow dip of a head, a flank twitching, before you could fit the outlines together again.
I pressed up to the fence. There was a blur of brown and tan and then the buck trotted over to me. He scraped his hooves on the ground beside the pond. He nodded and lowered the tines of his antlers through the chain-link and rasped them on metal, rolling his head. I put out my finger and touched the point of his antler, smooth, cool, and my heart hammered. The girls were cooing around me now, wanting to pet the deer.
Rusty and Tim crowded up beside me.
“I don’t see how my dad can shoot those things,” Rusty said. “Pretty neat, hunh?”
Tim said, “This is wild. I’ve got spring fever or something, man. I’d like to get ahold of a girl right now.”
“There’s about thirty of them right behind us,” Rusty said.
“I mean girls I didn’t know before they had breasts.”
I’d known most of the girls since first grade, like sisters. But lately they had changed shape, they wore their uniforms differently, and even their voices had changed to fit the additional curves. The difference fascinated me, especially that moment with everything warming and sun-printed and greening, and par
t of what I felt for Margie touched them.
Paul rested a flanneled arm across the fencetop. “In a natural state, these deer would be preyed on. That keeps them fast and graceful, almost invisible, and prevents overpopulation. I’m sure you’ve studied that catastrophe. We’re coming up on the predators next.”
Rusty, Tim, Wade, and I lined up across the front and walked in step.
The trees dripped moss and sunlight. An occasional deerfly stung, was slapped against a neck, fell, and then rose buzzing to sting elsewhere. Our black uniform shoes gently thundered to a bend in the trail, then clapped up a long wooden plank onto a deck. A fence skirted the marsh in a wide oval and wires ran along it to a metal box mounted on a pole. I saw only trees and grass and the river beyond.
Past a green palmetto fan slid something brown. There were gasps, steps taken backwards or forwards. It was a large cat, a panther. The cat slunk by underneath us, its shoulder blades jabbing smoothly beneath the fur as it padded a worn path in the grass all the way around along the fence. The cat stopped and looked up. Its eyes flashed and held on Tim, who was leaning dangerously out over the log railing, his toes six inches off of the deck planks, his eyes bright as the panther’s. My breath snagged as he tipped past his balance and flailed, treading air, but Rusty already had him by the belt, pulling him back before anyone else saw.
The cat dropped its gaze and prowled. Everyone crept closer. Paul, fallen behind with Ascension, crossed his arms, satisfied with our awe.
Tim whispered, “That animal saw something in me.”
Rusty, whose mouth had been hanging open, said, “He saw eighty pounds of meat, is what.”
Tim glowered. “Eighty-three.”
Wade said, “I’m going to draw one of those. Look at its muscles.”
I said nothing. Another cat, slightly smaller, appeared from the opposite side and began pacing towards the first one. The original cat raised its paw, fat as a mitten, and both panthers tensed and flattened and snarled at each other so that my eyes got wide. The panther swiped the air between them. The girls gasped, drew back again. Sticks were forgotten in the boys’ hands as they stared at these animals that could surely kill them. It smelled like the scariest part of the circus.
“Mountain lions,” Paul said quietly. “Cougars. Some folks up in the Appalachians call them ‘painters’ or panthers. They used to rule this part of the country, but there aren’t many of them left.”
“What happened to them?” asked Therese Parker, staring at the cats, her hands twisting nervously into her plaid skirt so that it raised above her knees, showed gooseflesh you wanted to sink your teeth into.
“People killed them because they were dangerous, unpredictable. Now everything’s safe.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “Automobiles and nuclear plants and all.”
Craig Dockery, the kid who’d hurt the duck, asked which would win, a cougar or an African lion. Paul said it depended. Donny Flynn said his granddaddy had shot a cougar in Florida. Paul asked if he ate it, but Donny didn’t know.
Tim nodded us over to the side away from the others.
Rusty said, “So how do we capture one of those things?”
“Blowgun,” Tim said casually. “I bring my blowgun down here and tag the cat with an anesthetic dart.”
“Where the hell we gonna get that stuff?”
“Steal it from a drugstore maybe. Or buy it off your sleazy drug buddy.” Tim meant the orphan kid who visited Rusty’s family one weekend a month.
“This is too risky,” I said. “Joey was right.”
“Risk leads to greatness,” Tim said. “Your sweetheart will love it. Francis Doyle, lion hunter.”
“We’d have to disconnect those wires,” said Rusty. “This fence is electrified.”
“So we’ll bring wire-cutters and rubber gloves.”
“Wait a minute,” Rusty said. “How do we get the panther all the way from here to Blessed Heart? These son of a bitches weigh more than we do.”
“We borrow a car,” Tim said.
“Nuh, its gettin too complicated. Too many places we can mess up. We got to streamline it.”
“Wade,” Tim said, “if one of those cats was knocked out, could you carry it?”
Wade puffed his cheeks, weighing the cats, then exhaled. “Sure. No problem.”
Rusty hissed. “That cat weighs a hundred and fifty pounds.”
“I weigh almost that. I’ve been lifting weights. I can hold that much on my shoulders.”
“Tim’s talkin about carryin it eight miles to Blessed Heart in the middle of the night. Without attractin attention.” Rusty shook his head and grimaced like he tasted something bad. “No way.”
“We could walk through the woods,” Wade said. “I could rest every once in a while. We could take turns.”
“Not me,” I said, relieved that it was seeming less possible. “Doctor’s excuse, hernia.”
Rusty shook his head again. “Tim couldn’t lift it either.”
“Fuck you,” Tim said. “I could pull it in a wagon.”
“Nuh,” said Rusty. “It’s just not… not—what’s the word?”
“Feasible,” said Tim. “But I’ll make it feasible. I’m plugged in to this.”
We followed Paul and the others to another deck. There was a giant live oak in the center of the area.
Paul said, “There’s a bobcat up there, see?”
The limbs swayed in the breeze, moss waving, leaves rippling, and then part of a limb flowed down itself towards the trunk, flicked a short tail up, and became a cat. The trunk of the tree and the tops of the limbs were red-brown where claws had scoured the bark.
“These fellas still live in the woods all over the place,” Paul said. “But you’d have to use dogs to find them.”
The bobcat flowed back up the trunk, its stubby tail curled forward and swishing. It jumped to a higher limb and stuck quick on top like a magnet.
Tim called out, “Are they dangerous?”
Paul said, “Sure. They can kill full-grown deer. Pioneers thought they rode deer through the forests the way we ride horses. Actually, this is because they kill by jumping on the deer’s back and biting through the spinal cord or jugular.” Paul’s fingers became jaws and he clamped them on his neck. The girls moaned. “If they don’t succeed right away, they’re in for one heck of a ride. Normally they won’t prey on people, though there have been some rare attacks on children.”
Tim was already gloating. “How much do they weigh?”
“Generally about twenty-five pounds. These lazy cats are a little plumper. There’s another one in that bush to the right.”
The new cat’s eyes floated in the green and brown.
“I can picture a rope dangling from that tree limb,” said Tim quietly. “I see us doping the wildcat and carrying it back in a pillowcase. On our bikes. Then we’re out of school, out of trouble, and have something amazing to tell our grandchildren.”
“That’s just a chicken-wire fence,” Rusty said. “No juice to fool with.”
“What about it, Francis?” Tim asked.
My palms had moistened, because I could see us doing it. I was scared because I wasn’t very scared. “Easy as pie.”
“These cats don’t look dangerous to me,” said Wade. “I liked the big ones better.”
“This is smarter, Wade. Stripped down. It reminds me of those Picasso drawings of the bull that got simpler and simpler until it was just a couple of lines. But you still saw the bull. You know the ones?”
That comparison sparked an idea in my own head. “You haven’t got to the final step yet.”
“What’s that?” Tim asked.
“We don’t take the cat to school at all. We just set it free. It’s reported missing, we leave the notes and bust a window— maybe leave some bobcat droppings or something. And since they won’t find the cat, it’ll take them longer to decide to reopen school. We don’t endanger students or the cat, so if we get caught, it’s nothing.”
Rusty said, “Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose? Hell, why not set the cougars free too?”
“No,” Tim said. “They’re too big to live in these woods. Hell, I believe Francis is right. It’ll be beautiful. It’ll take a minimum of effort but’ll accomplish the same thing.”
The bobcat padded out to the end of a limb and cawed, almost like a bird. The girls made kissy noises and stretched their hands out as if to be licked. Melissa Anderson wished for a bowl of milk.
“Lemmings,” Tim said. “Those cats would as soon rip their throats out.”
“It does look pretty much like a house cat,” Rusty said. “I don’t believe it’ll close the school down.”
“It could kill a first-grader,” Tim said. “Look at the size of those paws, the way it moves through that tree. It’s an economysize panther. It’s got handfuls of razors. Run up your chest and swallow your throat.”
Rusty said, “I say we train it to rip Rosaria’s head off. That’ll get us out of class.”
Tim laughed, delighted at the absurdity and gore. Joey O’Connor wandered up beside him and cleared his throat with a grunt.
“All right,” Joey said, as if finishing a prior conversation. “I’ll help y’all nab the wildcat.”
Tim said, “Forget it, Joey. We’ve given up on the plan and decided to just take the consequences.”
Joey squinted, wiped his glasses on his shirt. “No, no. I think you ought to go through with it. Otherwise, we’re doomed. I’ve worked this all out in my mind. I’ve started doing exercises.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tim grinned at Rusty. Joey would be going with us.
I enjoyed the rest of the trail. I felt almost strong, being outside among animals. Paul showed us sleepy black bears and an otter that slicked through its pond like a fish and moved easy as a weasel on land. We saw wolves. Their den was in tree roots, but they ran around the pen constantly. I think they smelled the deer.
We watched pelicans eat. They scraped stiff fish from the concrete, slid them into their pouches with a slapping of their bills, then washed them down with a gulp of water. You saw the bulge travel down the neck. An eagle shrieked at us. I’d never heard that before. At the end, raw-headed vultures, a hawk, and a white owl watched us pass. The owl’s head swiveled all the way around until it was backwards.
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys Page 6