The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  Both of his aunts could produce tissues from mid-air the way magicians did coins. Almost always, the tissues were for others, but now Zippo dabbed at her own eyes. The orange eye-shadow on her lids looked caked and layered and permanent, like veins in sedimentary rock.

  “Nothing, sweetie,” she said. “It’s your silly old aunts. You look thin.”

  Even more unsettled, Daniel kissed her, anyway. “It’s great to see you.”

  “Oh, Daniel. I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with all this again. So soon after your dad, I mean. It’s not fair.”

  “It’s never fair,” Daniel said quietly. “Isn’t that what you taught my mom?”

  “Yes.” Aunt Zippo’s face had long since begun to cave in, the nose sinking into its cavity and the mouth losing shape, and there were red, spidery blotches everywhere. She looked like a cherry pie. With whip-cream hair. She dabbed once more with the tissue. The tissue vanished. “But I meant for me.” With that singular smile that always looked half-melted, almost all mouth-turned-down, Zippo touched his cheek, and Daniel felt simultaneously near tears and buoyed.

  The Angel of Mercy. The Worst Luck in the World.

  Ethel rumbled back into the entryway, and Aunt Zippo clucked.

  “What?” Ethel snapped. “Let’s go. Daniel, you’re driving.”

  Ethel hadn’t changed her top or her shorts. But she’d somehow yanked on yellow winter tights and a long-sleeved thermal undershirt beneath them. Feeling a surprising grin creep onto his lips, Daniel followed his aunts out the front door into the icy morning.

  He actually had to hurry to get to the car before them and flip the locks. Before he could do it for her, Ethel had somehow bent low enough on her creaking hips to pull the passenger seat-lever and climb into the back.

  “Ethel, I’ll sit there,” Zippo said.

  “Oh, be quiet, you’re too tall.” Ethel yanked the seat into position in front of her. “Come on, Daniel.”

  “Ladies. Would either one of you like to tell me where we’re going?”

  For an astonishing moment, even Zippo looked exasperated with him. “The farm, Honey. Where do you think?”

  “The farm. Right. Either of you want to tell me which…” But he realized that he knew. At the same moment, he also realized what had seemed so strange about the buffalo on their hill. Other than the fact that there were photographs of them on his aunt’s wall.

  He’d seen those buffalo. Knew that hill.

  “Buddy’s Farm,” he said.

  “Of course, Buddy’s Farm,” Ethel snapped, “let’s—”

  “Oh,” said Zippo, and moved off toward the white Le Sabre parked a good five yards behind Daniel’s car and another five from the curb.

  “Zippo!” Ethel called.

  Ignoring her sister, Zippo leaned into her front seat and returned with a white baker’s box wrapped in bowed white twine. She handed Daniel the box before circling the car and lowering herself into the passenger seat.

  “That couldn’t have waited until we got back?” Ethel asked as Daniel keyed the ignition.

  “Daniel’s here.” Zippo smiled that upside down, half-melted smile and patted his leg. “Daniel gets chocolate tops.”

  The shudder that rippled across his shoulders startled him. At least it passed quickly. “Thank you, Aunt Zip,” he said. He started to wrestle with the twine, and Zippo clucked and took the box from him and neatly unpicked the knot.

  “Let’s go,” Ethel barked.

  Mostly, Daniel knew the way, though he couldn’t remember driving to Buddy’s Farm himself before. In fact, he didn’t even think he’d been there in at least ten years. The sun had slipped through the cloud cover, though its light served only to turn the dead grass and the bare trees whiter. He started to turn right, Ethel corrected him with a clipped, “No,” and Zippo began pushing random buttons trying to tune his radio.

  “What do you want to hear?” Daniel asked through a mouthful of thick, fudgy frosting from the cookie Aunt Zip had practically stuffed between his lips. “Don’t know if I’ve got any big Xave, but—”

  “The news, Honey. The update. Hurry.”

  The hurt in Zippo’s voice—and even more, that low trill of panic—alarmed Daniel all over again. He punched the Band button and got a talk station, expecting weather, traffic, the usual babble. Instead, there it was.

  “The National Guard has been activated,” the reporter’s voice was panting. “Once again, residents of Pikesville, Sudbrook Park, and Woodholme are asked to stay indoors and off the roads. And if you’re driving on the beltway, until these animals are located and secured, please use extreme caution, and be aware that there may be substantial delays.”

  “Even more substantial than usual,” laughed the throaty, in-the-studio host, and Daniel stared at the dial.

  “What the hell?” he said, and the first sirens screamed behind him.

  He barely had time to pull to the gravel shoulder before a train of police cars rocketed past. In the window of the last, Daniel glimpsed a deputy loading a long, black rifle.

  “Oh my God,” he murmured, turning toward his aunts. “Did you see…”

  But they had seen. He could tell by the looks on their faces. Ethel’s eyes had gone steely, her mouth firm and flat. Even more disconcerting was the way Zippo dropped her head into the folds of her shawl and hugged her arms around herself.

  “Maybe we should go home,” he said. Neither aunt answered.

  Checking the rearview mirror multiple times, Daniel edged back onto the street. A helicopter whirred past overhead. Cautiously, Daniel turned the radio lower. When neither of the aunts objected, he turned it off. They drove in silence for a while.

  “Hurry up,” Ethel murmured, though her tone lacked its usual barking cheerfulness.

  On both sides of them, the houses vanished. The road cut through cropless farm fields now, divided only by stands of oak and elm, a few half-hearted wooden fences.

  “So,” Daniel finally said, if only to break the strangely pregnant silence. “I guess Buddy still lives there?”

  “He still does,” Zippo said.

  “And he still keeps random animals, just for fun? Buffalo? Cheetahs? Remember when he had that elephant? How is he even allowed to have animals like that? Ooh, remember those hairless alpaca or whatever they were, and—”

  “They’re our animals,” Ethel said, and smacked the backseat. “Goddamn him.”

  “Yours?”

  “We’re sponsoring them,” Zippo said. “Ethel and I. Buddy’s their caretaker.”

  “Some care,” Ethel snapped, and Zippo shushed her.

  Then, abruptly, they’d arrived. Daniel recognized the hillside with its sagging cyclone fence, and the prickly ash tree with the forked trunk and the bare branches curling in on each other like clawed fingers on an arthritic hand. The parked police cruiser with its rooftop light-bars flashing was another clue. By the time he’d brought the car to a stop on the gravel, Aunt Zippo had her door open, and Ethel was practically pushing her from the car.

  “Hold on,” Daniel said. “They’re not just going to let you…”

  But both of them were out, now, and Aunt Ethel had already lumbered to the top of the long drive that dropped through the field of dead grass to the farmhouse. A burly police kid with shoulders roughly the width of the tire axle on his cruiser had stood to block her. He wasn’t really a kid, Daniel realized as he hurried forward. Just a whole lot younger than Ethel or Zippo. His black night stick and the holster of his gun bumped against his leg.

  “You’re going to escort me?” Aunt Ethel was saying. “They really are teaching better manners at the academy these days.”

  The cop—blond, probably not even thirty, cheeks flushed with the cold—just stared at the bobbing, flame-haired bird-woman in front of him. Ethel was several steps past before he recovered himself and stepped into her path again.

  “Are you telling me you didn’t notice the police cars?” the cop said, folding his arms. “T
he helicopters everywhere? Lady, you really ought to turn on your radio.” He reached out, intending to steer her firmly back up the hill.

  “What? Son, I don’t hear so well.”

  Somehow, she’d got by him again. Beside Daniel, Zippo sighed and moved to follow her sister. A nervous tremor twitched in Daniel’s throat, and he hurried after them.

  The cop had moved to grab Aunt Ethel’s arm again. Only when she glared at his hand did he think better of it. From across the fields, somewhere on the other side of the hickory forest that bordered Buddy’s farm, a siren wailed. Answering wails and their echoes flooded the air, as though a wolf pack had materialized in those trees.

  Which, all things considered, didn’t seem so improbable.

  “Look. Ma’am,” said the cop. “You can’t go down there.”

  “Why, did Buddy warn you about us?”

  The cop stared again. Ethel waddled off with Zippo right behind her. By the time Daniel reached the policeman, he was staring down at his own hands. There was a chocolate top cookie in them. The policeman looked up, and Daniel shrugged, started to smile.

  “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 woods—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 ways 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.

  “Oh, no,” Ethel said. “Oh, boys.”

  How long, Daniel wondered, had this scene been frozen like this? He could see what had happened. The recess bell ringing. The sound startling the buffalo, who’d rumbled right through the fence, smack in between this last group of straggling kids and the safety of their classroom.

  On the blacktop, Daniel saw two teachers and a towering African American man in pinstripes gesturing furiously at each other, the kids, the cops. All along the fence, walkie-talkies spit static and snatches of hard, unintelligible instruction.