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| THE DAY THEY SHOT A WOLF IN THE
GHETTO AND WHAT IT MEANT I say I saw her end, but I didnít. And how she began, nobody knows. In prison is what the paper pretends: in a pen, in a lab, with the gate half open, and the wolf lunging out to get free. As if that wasnít just the lead to their story but the start of her life. Which then took off in a streak of gray across dark green lawns - its ears pressed flat, its legs going hard ‚ so the students, walking, their books in their arms saw something they didnít understand sprint (fast) across what they did. Before they could ask what it meant, she was gone. Like a dream disappears at the edge of meaning and means something else on the other side. Except, of course, she wasnít a dream. As soon as she leapt away from the curb, she became what the drivers swerved around: the kind of soft mistake that wakes the kids or ruins the job or the marriage. The drivers did what they always did: they leaned on their horns and kept on going. Shaking, now, and wet with panic, the wolf dove (blind) into narrow darkness and ran for a long time from alley to alley. Parts of the world are like the veins in an arm: hit one deeply enough, and itís a disappearance. The wolf submerged into pure silence, till she came up, across town, in a garden. Chlorine pools. Plastic fish. Iron deer at absurd attention. A landscape chose to look like nature but safer than that: frozen solid. Green light slanting through planted trees. She must have stopped there and sampled the breeze, maybe licked at the blood between the cracks in her paws, fooled into thinking she could stop and relax by blending, like everything else, into richness. But the paper, later, quoted a witness: ìI thought,î said the woman, ìshe looked kind of funny. Panting like that. And without anybody. So when she didnít move, I called the cops.î They spotted her there like youíd spot an idea in the midst of a conversation. And after that, came the wail of sirens streaking across suburban blocks ‚ smearing the sense and symmetry ‚ till she hit the link fence by the railroad tracks. Where (foam streaking her back) she crossed over. The winos, the women at the laundromat, barely noticed her passing. ìTake one to know one,î they kidded later. Like the mistake of the rookie cop when he asked if theyíd seen something dark and scared run past, and everyone pointed in different directions - towards the sewer, the projects, up into heaven ‚ till the cop had to drive away. They caught her, finally, when the neighborhood dogs started whining at the smell of fear in the air. The cops simply cut off their sirens and stared, and the howls of the dogs rose like a map superimposed on the back of the city. If the wolf has to be a symbol of something, then the symbol now trembled in knee-high grass. A vet in a pure white van pulled over: in his trunk, a collection of tranquilizers ‚ on his hands, a pair of surgical gloves ‚ as if we became what we touched. ìWe had her,î the officer said, ìin a corner and were attempting to take her alive, as ordered, when she charged. And two of my men dispatched her before she could do any harm. Their reaction,î he added, ìwas totally normal.î The paper, later, came up with a moral by quoting the Dean of Science. ìWe are saddened,î he said, ìby the use of violence and the subsequent loss of learning.î But that wasnít learning I saw in the grass, turning over and over itself till it died. Her body was carted back to the lab, untied on a table for the students to study, and then what was left of the wolf was abandoned. Which is yet another end to the story. Except, of course, there was still the body and the meaning of that depended, again, on how it looked (all cut into parts) and when and where it was (on the floor). The way I see it, in a single movement, they dropped the wolf down a chute to the basement where, in a plastic bag, she escaped. Daniel Wolff |
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