The Pikesville Buffalo

“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 of 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.”

“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.