Free Wild Child by T. C. Boyle Page A

or purchase some meat—steak, rump roast, whatever they had—and she’d pay them later because this was an emergency and she couldn’t talk about it now. Meat, that was what she needed. Any kind of meat.
    She had a fantasy of dropping wet slabs of it across the lawn in a discontinuous path that snaked up the gravel walk and through the open door of the garage, the big cat lured inside where it would settle down to sleep over a full belly between the dryer and the Toyota. But no. She hardly knew the Kaprielians. And what she did know of them she didn’t like, the husband a big-bellied inimical presence bent perpetually over the hood of his hot rod or whatever it was and the wife dressed like some sort of hooker even in the morning when she went out to the driveway to retrieve the newspaper …
    She didn’t believe in meat and neither did Doug. That was one of the things that had attracted her to him, one of the things they had in common, though there were other things—mountains of them, replete with ridges and declensions and towering heights—in which they were polar opposites. But Doug had worked two summers in a chicken plant in Tennessee, snatching the chickens up out of their cages to suspend them on a cable by their clamped feet so they could proceed to the pluckers and gutters, and he’d vowed never again to touch a piece of meat as long as he lived. He’d strung up tens of thousands of bewildered birds, their wings flapping in confusion amidst the chicken screech and the chicken stink, one after another heading down the line to have their heads removed and their innards ripped out. What did they ever do to us, he said, his face twisted with the memory of it, to deserve that?
    She was still down on her knees, her eyes fixed on the swell of the tiger’s ribs as they rose and fell in the decelerating rhythm of sleep, thinking maybe she could give it eggs, a stainless steel pan with raw egg and then a line of individual eggs just tapped enough to show the yolk, when the back door of the neighbors’ house jerked open with a pneumatic wheeze and there was the Kaprielian woman, in her bathrobe and heels no less, letting the two yapping Pomeranians out into the yard. That was all it took to break the spell. The door wheezed shut, the dogs blew across the grass like down in a stiff wind, and the tiger was gone.
    Later, after the dogs had got through sniffing and yapping and the neighborhood woke to the building clangor of a Saturday morning in March—doors slamming, voices rising and falling and engines of every conceivable bore and displacement screaming to life—she sat with Doug at the kitchen table and stared out into the gray vacancy of the backyard, where it had begun to rain. Doug was giving the paper his long squint. He’d lit a cigarette and he alternated puffs with delicate abbreviated sips of his second cup of overheated coffee. He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt stained with the redwood paint he’d used on the picnic table. At first he hadn’t believed her. “What,” he’d said, “it’s not April Fools’, not yet.”
    But then, there it was in the paper—a picture of a leathery white-haired man, a tracker, bent over a pugmark in the mud near a dude ranch in Simi Valley, and then they turned on the TV and the reporter was standing there in the backwash of the helicopter’s blades, warning people to stay inside and keep their pets with them because some sort of exotic cat had apparently got loose and could be a potential danger—and they’d both gone out back and studied the ground along the fence in silence.
    There was nothing there, no sign, nothing. Just dirt. The first few spatters of rain feathered the brim of her hat, struck at her shoulders. For a moment she thought she could smell it, the odor released in a sprinkle of rain, the smell of litter, fur, the wild, but then she couldn’t be sure.
    Doug was staring at her, his eyes pale and wondering. “You really saw