Naw, you’re doing fine, your brother says. He stumbles a little in the dust, the effect of the six-pack he drank down to empty cans during the target practice.
When you rise, the great raptor is held between your hands. Bill holds the jacket in place over the bird but the hawk’s huge feet are still visible, splayed out before you, talons sharp and terrible but also beautiful and so perfect that the sight of them empties your breath. When you set the hawk on the tailgate, those claws scrape and rattle against the metal like knives.
You climb into the bed as Bill holds the jacketed hawk in place. What are we gonna do with him? you ask.
We can call Uncle David and ask him, Bill says. Maybe he knows a zoo or someone who can take care of her.
Can’t we?
I don’t think so, Nat. She’s wild.
We could try.
Let’s just get her to town. Then we’ll figure it out. And be super careful of those claws. They can probably cut you up pretty bad.
Damn right, Rick says, his voice high and excited.
Then you are settled in the bed of the truck near the cab, Rick beside you, Bill behind the wheel and pulling forward onto the road. The hawk is quiet but you can feel its life even through the jacket, a kind of fierce and fragile whirring that seems to run up through your arms and into your chest. What thoughts you have are about the impossibility of this moment, that some great and mighty creature of the air might find itself broken beside a roadway just at the moment that you and your friend and your brother happen to pass. And yet here it is between your hands, a wild thing as if from some storybook.
You keep that great creature close for the rest of the day, releasing it from the jacket and watching as it leaps around in the dust between the mobile homes. You wish you had a mouse or a rat to feed it but you can think of no way to get one and so you simply wait with it there, its one wing folded into its body, the other dragging, until, in the early evening, a truck from the Nevada Department of Wildlife arrives and two men load the hawk into a plastic box.
What are you gonna do with her? you ask.
There’s a raptor lady out near Reno, one of the men says. She’ll take good care of her.
All right, you say, but you are shaking your head no all the while.
When they drive away, Bill remains with you between the trailers for a long time, sipping at a can of Budweiser and puffing now and then on his cigarette. Neither of you speak. The sun is low in the sky to the west and the trailers cast long stripes of shadow across the road.
You did a good job with that bird, your brother says at last.
You nod and for reasons you cannot begin to understand, your eyes fill with unwarranted and irreconcilable tears. You turn away from your brother now because you do not want him to see, because he does not cry and so you will not either, and after a moment he says, Well, I’m going in, and you manage a quick, clear OK, and then you are alone and the sun is casting down beyond the edge of the mountains to the west and soon the whole of the desert is plunged into darkness.
TWO YEARS later, in the fall of 1978, you are perched on the edge of the tattered lime green sofa in your trailer’s tiny living room, Rick beside you, your mother in her recliner, while on the static-snowed screen of the television Marlin Perkins wrestles an anaconda in a muddy pool. Coils and coils of slick tan and black scales and muddy water. A moment of black hair. Hands frothing the surface. And when Stan Brock’s head once again appears, the coils are wrapped around his face, across his mouth, his jaw, and he struggles to pull them away. Marlin pulls at the beast’s head, his teeth clenched, gripping the great snake’s jaws between his fists, the rippling body wrapping around his legs even as it drags Stan yet again under the surface.
You are frozen, watching the screen. All three of you are. Your mother has offered a constant flow of words during the program, but even she is silent now, prone in the recliner. There is, for the moment, not even the sound of their breathing. As if the air itself has been sucked clean of the trailer and is gone. You are sixteen years old but Wild Kingdom is still a show that you do not miss, no matter what, and although Rick sometimes complains about your devotion to it, he manages to be there every Sunday night, arriving just when the opening credits begin and remaining until well after the show has ended.
On the screen, Marlin looks tired and perhaps even a little afraid. His characteristic khaki safari outfit is soaked through and his white hair is swept back from his face by the flow of the churning water around him, the beast’s head gripped in his hands, its mouth snapping the air. Then he is on his back, his face just above water, one leg out of the water and completely wrapped in the snake’s thick, crushing coils. Perhaps he will drown. Perhaps he will drown right now on national television and the snake will pull him down its endless throat.
And it is just in that moment when there is a knock at the door.
It’s open, your mother calls.
The door swings open and when there is no further sound, you look up briefly from the television. The man there hesitates before stepping inside. Betty, he says. Then he looks at you and at Rick and nods.
You nod briefly in response, not knowing what else to say or do. The man is the sheriff, not a deputy but the sheriff himself, in his full uniform, khaki and stripes and badge shining in the light from the television.
Oh, she says. I didn’t know it was you, Jimmy. I look terrible. She throws herself forward once, twice, and finally the giant chair swings itself into an upright position, the footrest tucking back into its base with a springy clang.
I’ll need to talk with you for a minute, the sheriff says.