Rutting Season Read online

  * * *

  When Janie woke up the next morning, she couldn’t remember at first why she had the sick, hollow feeling in her stomach. Then it came to her: the cat. She lay there, staring at the ceiling with the bad feeling spreading out inside her until she had another thought, a better one: Cocoa Krispies. If she didn’t get down there, Jeremy might eat them all.

  She jumped up and pulled on her shorts from the day before. Maybe the cat had come back on its own, she thought. It might have gotten better in the night; it might be in the kitchen right now, eating its gross pebble food. She gave the cat’s bowl a sideways glance as she skipped through the kitchen: still full. Flies were sitting on it. She looked away.

  Melissa was at the table; the box of Cocoa Krispies was right next to her. Janie ran over and dug her hand in—lots left, enough for two bowls at least. But just as her fingers were closing around a fat handful, Melissa snatched it away. Cocoa Krispies scattered across the floor.

  “You wanna eat,” Melissa said, “you better find that cat.”

  “Give it to me!” Janie cried, jumping for the box.

  “Find that cat, you little shit,” Melissa said.

  “I’m hungry!” Janie wailed.

  Melissa gazed at her, hesitating.

  “Please!” Janie said.

  “Okay, put your hands out,” she said grudgingly. She scooped out some cereal and dropped it in Janie’s palms. Then she held the box up out of the way again. “Now go get that cat.”

  The air was hot and hard to push through. Janie shuffled around the perimeter of the house, crunching the chocolaty taste in her teeth. Past the trash cans and the pricker bush, past the place where the hose hooked up. With a little thrum of dread, she stopped at the evergreen bush. She didn’t want to look. She stood there for a minute, trying to think of a way out. Then her stomach growled and she gave up and dropped to her knees to peer under.

  It was still there, lying flat by the wall of the house, its tail resting in a yellowish pool of yuck. Janie lowered herself onto her belly and scooched toward it. The cat didn’t even look at her; it just lay there with its ribs jerking up and down. Sleeping, she thought. But when she crawled in a little farther, she saw that there were raw, red bulges in the corners of its eyes, like something that belonged inside was squeezing out.

  Something terrible was going to happen.

  She scrambled out from under the bush. Find someone, play something, she thought. She ran around the house, into the backyard. Jeremy was there, digging in the ground with a plastic shovel. He had a square pile of dirt, all patted together, and a hole he was digging to get more.

  Janie stopped next to him. “Whatcha making?” she gasped.

  “House,” he mumbled.

  “Can I play?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Fear moved like a fish in her belly. “Come on, move over. Let me play.”

  Jeremy dropped the shovel and let his arms fall down.

  She snatched for breath. “What’re you stopping for?”

  He shrugged.

  “You think I’m gonna wreck it? I ain’t gonna wreck it.”

  He had his head bent forward like someone was going to hit him.

  “Say something!” Janie yelled. Everything was broken up and ragged and she couldn’t breathe. “Say something, you stupid!”

  But Jeremy didn’t say anything, he just ducked his head under his arm, and she jumped up and smashed her feet down on his house.

  * * *

  Janie zigzagged across the yard like a pinball in slow motion—bush to picnic table to kitchen to bush. Every time she checked, the cat was still lying there, jerking its ribs up and down. When the kitchen was empty, Janie snuck in and got some food and a cup of water. But the cat wouldn’t eat or even move and when she picked its head up and held it over the water, its head just flopped down and splashed the water into the dust.

  Bush to table to kitchen to bush. After a while, the cat’s ribs stopped jerking. It looked flat, in the shadow of the bush; Janie could hardly make it out. She straightened up and walked back to the kitchen. Melissa was in there; she couldn’t go in. She turned away and walked back to the picnic table, then over to the bush. Something invisible was winding, tighter and tighter.

  Later, when Janie finally crawled back under the bush to check, the cat’s eyes were dull as old marbles. She reached her hand out and touched its leg: it was hard, like wood—wood with fur pasted on. As she watched, a couple of flies came and landed on its eyes. They poked with their poker things: eating them.

  Terror gripped her. She forgot about not telling. She backed out of the bush and ran up the steps and into the kitchen. Melissa was in there, smoking one of their mother’s cigarettes and talking on the phone.

  “It’s sick!” Janie cried. “The cat! It’s sick, you gotta help!”

  For a second, Melissa just stared at her. Then she jumped like she’d been slapped and let the phone clatter to the floor.

  “It’s sick!” Janie wailed, but Melissa had already run outside, the screen door smacked shut behind her.

  A voice drifted up from the phone, thin as a thread. “Hello? Melissa?”

  Janie bent down and picked up the phone and then suddenly her mother was coming, fast and angry, like something out of a bad dream.

  She snatched the phone out of Janie’s hand. “Who is this?” she said into it. “Department of what? Tommy who? No. No, okay? You got the wrong number. No!” She pressed the hang-up button and turned around.

  Run, Janie thought, but she couldn’t move.

  Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders. “What’d you tell her?” she hissed. “Huh? What’d you say to that woman?” Her fingernails were digging into Janie’s skin. “Tell me, you little shit!”

  But Janie’s body had gone stiff; she couldn’t speak.

  Her mother pushed her away and straightened up. “Shit!” she cried. She put her hand to her forehead. “Shit! What am I gonna tell Duane?”

  She dropped her hand and looked back at Janie with hard eyes. “You’re next. You hear me? I’m telling Duane you’re next.”

  * * *

  The cop car came down the road slowly, like it didn’t really care. Cops, not a nice man and woman like Tommy had or a farmer like Frank. Because of the crimes she’d done to the cat, Janie knew, but she was too tired to care. She stood by the window and watched as the car ambled into the cul-de-sac and made the lazy turn around. Melissa had already washed Janie’s hair with the lice soap and put her clothes in the grocery bags and now she was to stay in her room or else. Once she wouldn’t have listened, she would have taken off into the woods, but her legs had gone dead on her—her legs and her arms and the middle of her, too—they were stiff and dumb as wood. And anyway, it was too late; her mom had said so.

  The cop car stopped in front of the house and the engine cut off. For a long moment, nothing else happened. Then the doors opened and two cops got out, a fat one and a thin. Now another car was coming, a regular one. It pulled up behind the cop car and tried to park, jerking forward, going back. Then it stopped, too, and a Black man got out, then a Black lady. Now all four of them were turning, walking up the path.

  Janie’s pulse started to race inside the dead of her body. Downstairs, there was a flimsy knock on the screen door, a woman’s voice calling, “Hellooo!”

  Maybe no one would hear them, Janie thought; maybe her mother had changed her mind. But no, she could hear someone talking to them now—Melissa, it sounded like. Janie heard the squeal of the screen door being pulled back.

  Coming for her.

  She cracked open the door and stood behind it, listening.

  “Let’s pack up a few of your favorite outfits, okay?” someone was saying. “You got a favorite T-shirt?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was Jeremy, Janie could tell; only why was he packing? She slipped out the door and crept to the top of the stairs. It was the Black lady talking to Jeremy; she was leaning over so her face wa
s down by his.

  “Or a favorite toy?” she said.

  The woman’s voice was as smooth and dark as her skin. Like chocolate, Janie thought. She let her feet slide down over the edge of the top step and land with a bump on the next one.

  The woman looked up. “Oh, is this your other sister? Hi! I’m Deanna. What’s your name?”

  Melissa took the cigarette out of her mouth. “That’s Janie,” she muttered.

  Janie let her feet slide down a few more stairs.

  “Janie? Short for Jane?” the woman was saying. “Now that’s pretty, you know? That’s a classic. Well, Janie, you’re gonna come away with me for a few days, okay? So I need you to pack up a few things—a couple a shirts and shorts, some PJs, a special toy if you want. But don’t worry too much about toys and things ’cause we got plenty, okay?”

  From the second-to-last stair, Janie watched the woman’s lips stretch open in a smile. She seemed like a nice lady, the kind who might give her things, but the words she was saying didn’t make sense. “You got toys at jail?” she asked softly.

  “What’s that, honey?” the woman said. “Oh, excuse me a sec.”

  Janie watched her as she walked over to the living room and leaned in the doorway. There was a pause, like the air was holding its breath. Then suddenly the baby started screaming.

  Janie ran to the doorway. Her mother was in there, holding the wailing baby, and the Black man was right in front of her.

  “You ain’t takin’ my baby,” her mother said.

  Everyone started talking at once—the woman, the cops—but Janie’s mother wasn’t listening, she was staring at the man, her eyes narrowed. “Whatcha gonna do, big man?” she was saying. “Huh? You gonna take my baby?”

  The fat cop stepped forward. “I’m gonna get her arm,” he said. “Then you get the baby, okay?” He walked up behind Janie’s mother and grabbed one of her arms. Then, very slowly, he began to bend it up behind her back.

  A shock went through Janie. That was her mother with her arm bent up; that was her mother they were hurting.

  She felt her mind, her limbs unstiff themselves. Now the Black man was stepping toward her mother; he was towering right over her. Janie’s body drew together, like an arrow in its bow.

  The man reached his arms out, his fingers open to grab, and Janie threw herself into the air, claws outstretched, a crazy cat scream ripping through her mouth.

  YOU THE ANIMAL

  Jared didn’t say he hated his job at the Department of Children and Families. He said it was time for a change, which sounded professional and mature and brought to mind his recent engagement and the financial responsibilities that would entail. As his future in-laws had taken to saying, he and Eliana would never be able to pay their bills if they were both saving the world, and she wasn’t about to give up teaching art in the New Haven public schools. Besides, Jared had just been accepted to law school. He’d be crazy to pass up that kind of an opportunity, he thought, looking around at the shabby office he shared with his supervisor, Deanna.

  “You sure the brother didn’t just go to a relative’s for the summer?” Deanna was saying into the phone. “You’re not sure. Uh-huh.” She swiveled her chair around to roll her eyes at him, the receiver still pressed to her ear.

  One of those calls. Jared shook his head at her in a show of commiseration. He didn’t really feel it, though. He didn’t feel much of anything about DCF now, aside from an overpowering desire to leave it behind. But Deanna would have been hurt if she knew that, and he wouldn’t have hurt her for the world. She was the reason he’d given two months’ notice when he could have gotten away with two weeks—two days, even. Hell, he could have walked out at lunch and never come back. People at the DCF had been known to do that. Leave a Post-it on the computer screen, grab your personal items, and—poof—outta there. But that wasn’t him; he wasn’t a shirker. He lived up to his responsibilities, whether he liked them or not.

  He looked again at the case files lying on his desk: nineteen neat bundles of chaos and despair. The sight of them gave him a compulsive urge to do something else—check email, text Eliana, put his head on the desk and sleep.

  * * *

  In the beginning, Jared had assumed that he would care deeply about his “families,” as they were called. He had pictured himself bringing the kids to the movies, having heart-to-hearts with the parents, guiding them all back to safety and sense. Deanna did that, was that. She called the moms on their birthdays and took the kids out for meals; found out who needed money for a prom dress or a basketball uniform and made sure they got it. She never seemed to feel disgusted or discouraged; she just went in and sorted it out—who needed rehab, who needed counseling, who could take the children. If there was no rehab spot, there was no rehab spot, what could she do? Maybe one would open up later. She found whatever sliver of hope there was and held on to it: a clean drug test, a good report card, a little plastic Happy Meal toy one of the kids had given her. “Now, how about that?” she would say, the shine in her eyes untainted by doubt.

  What Jared felt was more like horror and then, over time, a growing impatience. Because who could help these people? Deanna had just filed a ninety-six-hour hold on a baby who had been scalded by her teenage mother—a girl who turned out to be one of four children Deanna had removed from a home ten years earlier, when she was a skinny eight-year-old dotted from the neck down with the burn marks of cigarettes.

  “Mmm mmm mmm,” Deanna had said when she recognized the girl’s name, the soft brown skin at the corners of her mouth puckering. But ten minutes later she was putting on her lipstick, asking if Jared wanted to go to KFC. He went, of course—he always went, even when he wasn’t hungry—and he ate, too. There was something about being with Deanna that calmed him. He loved to sit across the table from her and watch her arrange her food in her deliberate, dainty way. She was a big woman, not so much fat as soft, with a heavy chest and a comfortable roll of flesh above her belt. Had he thought about it, he would have realized she’d been beautiful once; the evidence was still there in her high cheekbones, her rich, red-brown skin. But it wasn’t beauty that held him, it was the signs of her aging: the little sags of flesh under her jaw, a huskiness in her voice that spoke of a wisdom accrued, one hard year after another, like layers of opalescent shell. She seemed to him to have a kind of earned and unimpeachable rightness that only women like her could claim, and he had a childish wish to save her from some sort of threat or trouble. He imagined her walking home in Newhallville, the black section of New Haven where she lived, walking home tired and alone, and some scumbag coming out of the darkness to mug her—a young black man was what he pictured, with a rush of outrage.

  Of course, he himself had been a young black man in that neighborhood once. Or at least that was how any stranger would have seen him. The fact that his mother was white was something people didn’t usually guess, dark as he was.

  “Your daughter said— Uh-huh,” Deanna was saying. “Well, you know, that’s kids. Let me explain what we do. Our job is to investigate suspected abuse or neglect, okay? Now, the first step is to report your concerns, as you are doing now. Then, my colleagues and I will conduct what we call a preliminary investigation to determine whether abuse or neglect is in fact— What? No? So it’s just that she thinks he’s been sent . . . and the brother. Maybe the brother. Okay. Well, tell you what, why don’t I give the school a call, see what they know. And you get back to me if you hear anything more, okay? Sure. All right. You take care now.”

  Jared heard her place the phone back in its cradle. “C and I?” he asked. “Conjecture and Innuendo” was their name for calls that gave them nothing to go on—no facts, no witnessed events, sometimes not even a name or address.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  He turned his head to look at her. “What’s the allegation?”

  “Well—that’s a good question.” She scanned the pad she’d been writing on. “Okay, so this mother, the one who called, she says her
daughter’s twelve-year-old boyfriend told her—told the daughter, I mean—that he’s been sent away to live with someone he doesn’t know.”

  He waited but she was silent, reading her notes. “That’s it?”

  “Uh-huh. And I guess that another brother was sent away last spring, also to live with someone he didn’t know.”

  “Someone like a relative?”

  She looked at him over the top of her leopard-print drugstore reading glasses. “See?”

  “You mean C and I,” Jared said, and they both laughed. She had a great laugh, Deanna.

  “Mmm mmm mmm,” she said, drumming her long nails on the desk. They were still painted like the American flag, the design she’d chosen for the Fourth a couple of weeks back. “Well,” she sighed, “maybe I’ll give the school a call, see if they know anything. Better safe than sorry, you know?”

  “I hear you,” Jared said. The previous winter, after months of anxious deliberation, the department had returned a seven-year-old girl to her parents only to have her body turn up in a Dumpster a few weeks later. No one was taking any chances after that.

  He pulled out the notes from his interview with Porsche Rivera and laid them on the desk. Will, their department head, had called that morning to ask for his report. Now that Porsche was pregnant again, they were going to conduct a comprehensive review of her case. All Jared had to do was type up Porsche’s answers and write a few paragraphs describing her “demeanor,” “appearance,” and “apparent emotional state.” Easy enough. He had been putting it off, though, for nearly two weeks.

  He filled his cheeks with air as he read over his notes. They were in a sorry state—sloppy, almost disturbed-looking. He’d have to throw them out after he finished the report.

  Cover his tracks.

  No, that wasn’t right—he hadn’t done anything wrong. Why should he be defensive? Porsche was the one who’d screwed up. Just get it done, he thought. He let the trapped breath shoot through his lips and opened a new document on his computer.