Free Wild Child by T. C. Boyle

ceiling of the trailer to blow off on the wind as if she were a bird herself—two scotches and two glasses of wine on a mostly empty stomach, the Lean Cuisine Salmon Gratin with Lemon
    & Dill sitting frozen on the counter. Still, she had the presence of mind to lean back in the chair, let out a deep breath and focus a smile on him. “All right,” she said, “you got me—what’s Question 62?”
    The answer consumed the next ten minutes, during which she put on her listening expression and poured them each another half glass of wine and the presence of the sun grew firmer as it sliced the blinds into plainly delineated stripes that began ever so slowly to creep across the carpet. Question 62, he told her, was coming up for a vote in seventy-two counties on the twelfth of April and it was as simple as this: should cats be listed as an unprotected species like skunks and gophers and other nuisance animals? They were coldly efficient predators and they were interfering with the ecosystem.
    They were killing off birds and outcompeting native animals like hawks, owls and foxes for prey, and the long and short of it was that any cat found roaming without a collar could be hunted without a license or season or bag limit.
    “Hunted?” she said. “You mean, with a gun? Like deer or something?”
    “Like gophers,” he said. “Like rats.” His eyes were fierce and he leaned over his empty glass as if he were about to snatch it up and grind it between his teeth. He was sweating, a translucent runnel of fluid leaching out of his hairline and into the baffle of his right eyebrow; in a single motion he shrugged out of his parka and pulled off the hat to reveal a full head of russet hair streaked blond at the tips. He was staring right into her.
    “I don’t like guns,” she said.
    “Guns’re a fact of life.”
    “My husband was killed by a gun.” As she said it, a flat statement of fact, she saw Robert lying in the dirt not fifty feet from where they were sitting now and she heard the sirens and the gunshots, and the face of Tim Palko from the trailer across the way came back to her, Tim Palko, drunk for a week after he lost his job and gone crazy with his deer rifle till the SWAT team closed in and he put the barrel of it in his own mouth and jerked the trigger one last time. But she’d seen death—she saw it every week at the Page Center—and when she looked out the window of the trailer after the first shot thumped through the afternoon like the beat of a bass drum that never reverberated, she could see from the way Robert was lying there that it had come for him and come instantly. Mae had said, How could you be sure?, but she had two eyes and she knew absolutely and incontrovertibly, and that knowledge, cold as it was, grim as it was, saved her. If I’d run out there, Mae, she told her, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.
    The man—Todd—dropped his eyes, made a noise in the back of his throat. They were silent a moment, just listening to the wind, and then the clouds closed in and the sun failed and the room grew a shade darker, two shades, and she reached for the pull on the lamp.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “It must be hard.”
    She didn’t answer. She studied his face, his hands, the nervous bounce of his right heel. “What I was thinking,” she said finally, “is maybe opening another bottle. lust one more glass. What do you say?”
    He looked up at her with that grin, the grin resurrected in the space of a heartbeat to make everything all right again. “I don’t know,” he sighed, and he was watching her now, watching her as intently as he’d been a moment ago when he was delivering his speech, “but if I have another glass I’m going to want to lay down.
    How about you? You feel like laying down?”
    For a long while Mae crouched there in the wet earth, toying with the idea of backing noiselessly across the lawn so she could slip next door to the Kaprielians’ and see if she could maybe borrow