The Pikesville Buffalo

By Glen Hirshberg

Late that November, a few months after his twenty-four year-old wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, Daniel felt a sudden urge to see the Great Aunts. He tried Ethel first, calling five times over a two-hour period, but kept getting the busy signal which meant either that she was talking to one of her children or stepchildren or — more likely — that she’d taken her phone off the hook to avoid talking to them. Finally, he called Zippo and got her on the first try.

“Of course, dear,” she told him, sounding muffled as ever, as though she were speaking through the orange wool shawl she always kept about her shoulders.

“Could you beam the news over to Aunt Ethel?”

“What? Oh, Daniel.” It was an old joke, his father’s, about the telepathic link that seemed to connect the sisters.

“How’s your lovely Lisa, honey?” Zippo asked.

“Okay, I think. Still not sleeping very well. The doctors think they got it all.”

“Poo-poo,” said Zippo, and Daniel hung up.

The next morning, he awoke before five, kissed Lisa where she lay twisting in the blankets, and, for the first time in over a year, drove the hour and a half from his dumpy beach-neighborhood shack on the Delaware coast into Baltimore and out Reiserstown Road toward Pikesville. The early morning gray never lifted, and the grass everywhere had already died. Something about the old neighborhoods near the Great Aunts had always unsettled Daniel, even during his childhood when he’d visited them every weekend. The low, redbrick houses seemed to have too few windows, too many chimneys, and they were always tucked back in the shadows of the tallest trees on their lots like little warrens. Rotting, unraked leaves littered the lawns. The oaks and elms and black locusts stood midwinter-bare.

Pulling up outside Ethel’s house — which was small, stone, and too long at either end for its slanted roof, as though emerging from the maples with its hands on its hips — Daniel shut off the car and was surprised to see his own hands shaking. He sat a few seconds, staring through the windshield at the gray, thinking not of Lisa but of cancer. It was true, what Zippo had told him not long after his father had died. Cancer didn’t just kill people; it blurred them, left a hazy, pointillist blotch where memories of the lives they’d lived before the disease should have been.

Abruptly, he slammed his fist down on the horn. For all they knew, Lisa really was finished with cancer. Forever. They’d caught it early, taken it out. He really needed to get the hell over it.

Which was exactly why he’d come. Popping open the door, he stepped onto the pavement, expecting Pikesville silence, winter wind. Instead, he got Xavier Cugat.

Before he even reached his Aunt Ethel’s front steps, Daniel was smiling. It wasn’t just the incongruity — all those congas and horns sashaying down this street of old homes and older Jews — but the volume. Daniel swore he could see the surrounding houses shuddering on their foundations, the drawn curtains in nearby windows twitching their skirts. He half-expected the police to arrive any second.

Daniel tried the front doorbell first, but of course, that was useless. Hunching against the cold, he slipped around the side. He was already past the screened-in porch when his Aunt opened the side door.

“Oy-yoy-yoy,” she said, nodding at his coat, one hand fluttering off the hips she could no longer shake and making mambo motions. “Is it really that cold out?”

Daniel stared. The rooster-crest springing from his aunt’s scalp glowed a luminous, freshly dyed red. She was wearing blue-jean shorts, a yellow t-shirt with a Queen of Hearts playing card and the legendAunty Up, Baby imprinted on it, and yellow vinyl slipper-sandals that displayed her virtually nail-less hammer toes in all their glory.

“Can’t you feel it?” Daniel half-shouted, moving forward to give her a kiss.

“Skin of a crocodile.” Aunt Ethel pulled demonstratively at the folds on her forearms.

“Toes of a troll.”

She smacked him playfully on the cheek before kissing him in the same place, then smeared the lipstick she’d imprinted there. “You find a troll who looks this good at eighty-two, give him my number, okay?” With an arthritic lurch Daniel realized afterward was a butt-bump, Aunt Ethel shuffled off inside, beckoning him with more of her rhythmic, slinky hand movements.

“Aren’t you worried about the neighbors?” Daniel called, shutting the door.

“What?”

“The racket. What if they call the cops?”

“The music? Honey, everyone within four blocks is stone deaf.”

She disappeared into her tiny kitchen to bring him the bagel, lox, and purple onion tray he knew she’d have prepared and refrigerated for him last night. The stereo shut down, and for one delicious moment, Daniel found himself alone, submerged in the familiar dimness of his Aunt Ethel’s house.

The memories that assailed him centered mostly around shivas, but were no less sweet for that: there was the midnight flag football game in the sleet fourteen years ago, two days after Uncle Harry’s death, when Daniel’s father — frail already, and with a hacksaw cough, but still slippery as a snowflake — solved the absence-of-spare-socks problem by suggesting they use yarmulkes for the flags instead; there was the morning he’d crept upstairs with Ethel’s perpetually wan, humorless thirty-four year-old son Herm after the early Mourner’s Kaddish at the shiva for Zippo’s second husband Ivan. He and Herm had used an entire roll of electrical tape, some torn-up egg cartons, and a box of discarded nine-volt batteries to try to get Herm’s homemade, childhood train set to run just one more time. It hadn’t, but the light-towers at the miniature baseball stadium flicked on a few times, and one of the crossing gates lowered and its bells rang. There was the three-hour jokefest after Rabbi Goldberg went home on the last night of Mack’s funeral two years ago. It began with Daniel’s recitation of Mack’s favorite about the rabbi, the leather worker, and the circumcised foreskins, and ended when Daniel’s father — barely able to speak, and confined to a wheelchair he couldn’t even sit up in — somehow gasped his way through the Fuck One Goat joke, while all the cousins and step-cousins alternately giggled and snuck glances at Aunt Ethel’s half-horrified mouth, quivering as it fought the laughter welling behind it. Daniel had been laughing, too, until he saw Zippo leaning into the shadows against the hallway wall, her eyes riveted on his father, her mouth pursed and her shoulders drawn back as though she could do his breathing for him.

Or had that been at the shiva for Zippo’s third husband, Uncle Joe, whom Daniel had only met twice, but who had the gorgeous lesbian granddaughter? Or for Uncle Bob, Mitchell’s shyer, gentler oldest friend?

No. Mack’s, because of the jokes. Just the way Mack would have wanted it. If he’d had his way, he’d probably have had Aunt Ethel blasting Xavier Cugat during the graveside service, too.

Standing now in Aunt Ethel’s tan-carpeted living room with the tea mugs on glass shelves and the library-sale Dick Francis hardbacks lining the walls, Daniel thought of what his mother had called Aunt Zip, years and years ago: the Angel of Mercy, or else the Worst Luck in the World. Tears teased the corners of his eyes, which had adjusted to the gloom, now. He glanced toward the wall of photos, blinked and moved closer.

“Uh… Aunt Ethel? Where’d everybody go?”

In she came, balancing not just the bagel tray but a chipped, porcelain jug of orange juice and a set of thirty year-old novelty glasses featuring stencils of Jim Palmer in his Jockey underwear on the sides.

“Eat; you look thin,” she said, somehow maneuvering the tray and glasses onto the tiny coffee table. “I got your favorite. Onion, sesame, pumpernickel.” She gestured toward the pile of toasted bagels.

“Just one of my favorites would have done.”

“Well, I have to eat, too, don’t I?”

Without waiting for him to choose, Aunt Ethel bent forward, drew half an onion bagel from the stack, and began slathering it with cream cheese and onion bits. Daniel gestured at the wall.

“Aunt Ethel, we really have to talk about you letting the buffalo herd play with the photographs.”

She lifted an old, open hardback off the table out of the way of the food and held it to her chest. The phone rang.

“Ugh,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking.”

Daniel grinned. “Okay, I’ll leave.”

She tsked and smacked his leg with the book, then studied him a while.

“Too thin,” she said.

She reoffered the bagel, and Daniel took it, though he wasn’t hungry. Almost casually, he glanced at his aunt’s hands, looking for signs of shaking. There were none.

“Seriously,” he said. “What happened to the boys?” He nodded toward the wall, most of which was blanketed with the same collage of framed snapshots of children and stepchildren and grandchildren Daniel had practically memorized during all those childhood visits, or more likely during the shivas, when there was so little to do but eat and stare at faces. But sometime in the past year, Aunt Ethel had apparently replaced the photos of herself and Aunt Zippo and the six husbands they’d buried between them.’

“They’re right there.” She began pointing down the row of new photos, each of a different shaggy, horned, decrepit-looking buffalo standing atop a grassless little hill in front of a cyclone fence. Unless it was the same buffalo.

Laughing through a mouthful of bagel, Daniel said, “I meant your boys. Joe, Mack, Har—”

“There’s Harry.” Aunt Ethel directed his gaze toward the farthest-right buffalo. “Sleepy-eyed and slow as ever. Here’s Joe. And see Mitchell, could he be any more of a cliché, do you think?”

Baffled, Daniel followed his Aunt’s finger. This buffalo had one of its legs off the ground and its head lifted, gazing not at the grassless ground but through the fence.

“Look at him,” Aunt Ethel said. “Still busy. Somewhere in that yard, some overwhelmed, mesmerized sheep dog just agreed to purchase the complete long-term care plus annuities package.”

Daniel started to laugh again, but the expression on his aunt’s face stopped him. She wore the same loving smile she’d always leveled at him. But she was looking at the photographs.

“Aunt Ethel. You’re naming your buffalo pictures?”

“The buffalo, not the pictures.” Folding the book against her chest, Aunt Ethel gave a satisfied sigh. “And we didn’t name them, what are you talking about? Did you name Lisa?”

“What?”

“How is she, by the way? Oy vay, she’s been through so much. You both have. So young.”

Laying the book on the couch and pinching his cheek, Aunt Ethel toddled out of the room with the empty orange juice jug. Daniel stared after her. It should have been funny. Just the latest of the thousand ways his aunt had found to flood her days with happier thoughts than her days seemed to merit. He wondered if she’d told Zippo. Somehow, he didn’t think Zippo would be amused.

Daniel looked down at the hardback on the couch, and bent to pick it up. It had no cover. But a number of its pages had been dog-eared, and when Daniel flipped to the first, he found a passage highlighted in bright pink marker. “The Holy Spark that fell when God built and destroyed the worlds, man shall raise and purify, from stone to plant, from plant to animal.. purify and raise the Holy Sparks that are imprisoned in the world of shells.” Next to the word “shells,” in the mock-parchment margins of the page, his aunt had drawn a smiley face.

Not Dick Francis, then. He flipped the book on its spine and raised an eyebrow. He’d never known his Aunt to crack a Sidur in synagogue, let alone the Kabbalah in her home.

“You’re going to have to come to the graves, okay?” Aunt Ethel said from the other room, and Daniel started.

“I’m sorry?”

“Thursday’s cemetery day, remember? I’d be okay skipping, I mean, they’re notthere anymore, but you know your other aunt. ‘A grave needs stones.’ So come with us, and afterwards we’ll go get coddies.”

“Ugh,” Daniel murmured. “Is that even real fish in those things?”

“What do you think the mustard’s for?”

Daniel started to smile, but stopped halfway. He was looking at the buffalo. Remembering Mitchell coming home from work, which is pretty much all anyone remembered of Mitchell. Harry with the trains. Most of all, Mack, spooling jokes through endless dinners, teaching his Aunt to rumba on two replaced hips.

For the first time in his life, he wondered if it had been a good idea coming here. He leaned forward to lay the book back on the couch, came face to face with the photograph of the buffalo with its leg in the air — Mitchell— and saw the cheetah for the first time.

Had that been there a second ago? Had he really not noticed that?

There it was, anyway, its nose to the gate of the fence in the background, one paw through the chicken wire. The blotchy, irregular spots on its fur looked more like mange than coloration, and there was an ugly pink patch above its back right haunch and another at the base of its neck.

“Aunt Ethel?” he called. “About this cheetah…”

“Mack?”

“Mack?”

The front door burst open, and Daniel swiveled toward it. From the tiny entranceway, he heard the scuffle of heavy boot heels, started to call a hello, but stopped when he heard the tremor in Zippo’s voice.

“They’re out. Ethel, my God, they’re loose. All of them.”

Daniel arrived just in time to see Aunt Ethel stumbling for the front closet, grabbing at the long, yellow overcoat she’d worn all of his life, and starting out the front door before Aunt Zip put a crooked, age-stained hand on her wrist.

“Honey, you’re going to freeze.”

With an annoyed glance at her shorts and t-shirt, Ethel hurried off down the back hallway toward her bedroom. That hallway, too, had always been lined floor to ceiling with family photographs, including a random series of Daniel at various ages, some of them with his parents. From where he was standing, Daniel could only see that there were still pictures. Had the one of his father been replaced, also? With orangutans, maybe?

Was there even one of Lisa? Had he ever given Aunt Ethel one?

Then Zippo’s hand was on his cheek, pulling his gaze around. Where Ethel was essentially a fire hydrant with hammer toes, Zippo loomed like a tall, bent oak. Whatever dye she used either never took or she kept washing it out, because her gauzy hair was mostly white tinged with blue.

“Hello, Aunt Zip.” He leaned in to kiss her, but halted midway. “Aunt Zip? What is it?”

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. 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 crop-less 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’reour 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. “The 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 policemen 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 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.

“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.

“Harry?” the African American man called abruptly, and both Ethel’s and Zippo’s heads jerked toward the buffalo. The same buffalo, Daniel noticed, the one farthest to the right with his nose in the grass and the broken tip of his horn jutting toward them like a shiv.

But the man was talking to one of the kids. And the kid was lifting his red hood off his ears. He was maybe eight, blond-haired, with chipmunk cheeks that would have amused either of Daniel’s aunts for weeks on end if they could have gotten their pinching fingers on them. He wiped a hand across his tear-streaked face and waited.

“Just walk this way, son,” the pinstripe man was saying. “Around the fence there. Come to us. Harry, lead them this way. All of you, now. Come on.”

None of the children moved. In the center of the yard, the buffalo stamped. One of them knocked horns with its closest neighbor, though the gesture looked accidental to Daniel. More like two old men bumping into one another with walkers than rutting.

Then the kid in the hood moved. The moment he did, the buffalo with the broken horn looked up, snorted loudly, and raked its foot along the grass. Instantly, rifles leapt to shoulders as the cops locked in, and the buffalo froze, sweeping its gaze once across the whole assembled mass before him. It chuffed again, pawed more frantically, and tore a huge hunk of dirt out of the lawn.

“Damn it,” spat a nearby radio.

Harry — the kid, not the animal — burst into fresh tears. Half a dozen safety catches popped free on half a dozen guns. Daniel was so busy watching the police that he didn’t notice Aunt Zippo moving until she was halfway across the yard.

“Jesus,” a policeman yelled. “Someone grab her!”

But Aunt Zippo had already reached the herd, and as Daniel’s mouth dropped open, she disappeared amongst them.

Even the children went silent. Around the old woman, the buffalo began to pant and paw nervously. One of them bumped her with its flank, and Daniel saw her stagger and get bumped by another and almost go down amidst their stamping feet. The one with the pointed half-horn had moved into the circle, now, and it was poking at Aunt Zippo with its head lowered and its front foot working furiously at the grass.

For one more moment, the unreality held. Daniel stared at the animals snorting around his aunt, alternately ignoring her and then brandishing horns and banging themselves against her. The eeriest thing wasn’t their presence. It was theirphysicality. Their breath and their scraped, hairy sides and their deep-set, black-brown eyes and the way their skin seemed draped over their skulls rather than attached to it, as though they were already skeleton and hide, and there was something else, something not-buffalo, underneath there.

His aunts’ faces, Daniel realized, looked the same way. Everyone’s did. His father’s. His wife’s. Hell, even his own face. Our features little more than cloaks life shrugs on while it camps inside us.

Somewhere to his right, a walkie-talkie crackled. Rifles shifted, held. Ethel was just staring, her hands over her mouth. Daniel threw his arm around her shoulder, squeezed once.

“I’ll get her,” he said.

“Oh, God,” said his aunt.

Then he was through the fence, flinging up his hand, screaming, “Wait! Don’t shoot!”

“Hold fire!” someone shouted.

Two guns exploded. Daniel ducked, whirled, waved a frantic hand, and broke into a run as the kids screeched and bolted for the blacktop. Over the tops of the nearest buffalo, Daniel could see his Aunt’s orange shawl, the back of her head with its thinning, blue-white hair like a cloud coming apart. The head disappeared as his aunt went down.

“No!” Daniel screamed, and the buffalo broke as one into a plunging, sideways dash toward the far end of the schoolyard, away from the children and the blacktop and the mass of muzzles and threatening faces.

All of them, that is, except the one with the horn. Harry. He had slid, with surprising grace, onto his front knees. Aunt Zippo was kneeling beside him. The buffalo seemed to hover there a moment, and then slipped the rest of the way to the grass.

Aunt Zippo laid, both her hands on the animal’s throat, under its mane. Its great black hooves had splayed to either side of her, and blood bubbled from the holes in its gut and over Zippo’s gloves.

“Ssh,” she was saying, in that hypnotic, even cadence she seemed to have been born with, or maybe just learned through too much practice. So many years of practice. “Ssh, Harry.” She never looked up, not once. She just kept whispering, over and over, until the buffalo died.

* * * *

It took hours, after that, for the truck to come, and for the animal wranglers to wrestle the surviving bison into it. By the time Daniel and his aunts got back to Ethel’s, it was too late to drive home, and he was too shaken, anyway. Ethel ordered pineapple pizza, which Daniel barely touched but which his aunts devoured. Ethel burst into tears once, and Zippo sat beside her and said, “I know. I know.”

“How many times?” Ethel sobbed, swiping at her cheeks and smearing pizza grease there.

Producing yet another of her magic tissues, Zippo wiped the grease away. “There doesn’t seem to be a limit.”

“You know, I still miss him the most. Harry.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t love him the most. He pretty much slept and worked and built Herm’s trains with him and wouldn’t let us eat donuts enough. But I miss him the most.”

“He was the first,” Zippo said.

“Don’t eat that last pineapple,” Ethel said, and snatched the final pizza slice from the box. Abruptly, she looked up at Daniel, held the slice toward him. “Unless you want it, honey.”

Daniel shook his head, closed his eyes, saw skeleton-flashes of white light, like the projected shadows of a CAT-scan. When he opened his eyes, his aunts were holding hands.

Zippo went home, and Ethel set him up in her son Herm’s old room with the train bedspread still draped over the bed. Daniel read a Dick Francis novel until well after midnight because he didn’t think he could sleep, nodded off with the book on his chest, and woke up weeping.

He didn’t think he’d called out, but his Aunt was at the door within seconds anyway, in a pink nightgown that had to have been at least thirty years old, and with what looked like a matching bonnet on her head. She didn’t ssh him — that was Zippo’s purview — but she asked several times if he wanted a bagel, and she clucked a lot, and in the end she sat on the edge of the bed and patted his hand, over and over.

“How do you do it, Aunt Ethel?” Daniel asked, through tears he couldn’t seem to stop. “How do you survive the love you outlive?”

Aunt Ethel just patted his hand, glanced around the room, out toward the hallway, still lined with photos of the families she’d created or joined, the children she’d borne and the families they’d formed. The hallway was also where she’d moved the pictures of the men she and her sister had buried, after replacing them in the living room with the buffalo.

“I know what Mack would have said,” she told him.

“What?”

‘“Did you hear the one about the rabbi and the stripper?’“

That just made Daniel sob harder. When he’d gotten control of himself again, he looked at his aunt. “What about you, Aunt Ethel?”

“Me?” She shrugged. “Mostly, hon, I think I just keep deciding I want to.”

It was a long while before the tears stopped completely and Daniel felt ready to lie back on his pillow. Ethel brought him warm milk, and he actually drank it. And it was after two when he awoke the second time, to the sound of the porch door swinging open.

Instantly, he was bolt upright. “Aunt Ethel?” he called. Grabbing his pants off the chair, he hurried down the darkened hallway, through the living room onto the screened-in porch. The side-yard lights were on, flooding the tiny yard.

Ethel was by the screen. Fifteen yards away, right where the grass disappeared into the stand of pines that marked the edge of her property, the cheetah crouched on its haunches, its tail whapping at the dirt. In life, even more than in its photo, the thing looked ancient, its yellow eyes rheumy, its fur discolored or missing entirely. It also had its disconcertingly tiny head cocked, its mouth open, and one front paw crossed over the other. There was something almost cocky in the pose. Composed, at the very least. Like a gentleman caller.

“Oh my God,” Daniel mumbled. “How on earth did it…”

“Mack’s home,” his aunt said, and glanced just once over her shoulder at Daniel.

“What?” But he was thinking of the buffalo on the wall. The ones Ethel and Zippo both insisted they hadn’t named, just called by name. “Aunt Ethel, that isn’t…”

Smiling, she stepped out the door.

It was those next, fleeting moments Daniel would remember, years later, at Lisa’s three-years-clean checkup, and again at her five years, when the doctors told her she didn’t need to come back every six months anymore, she just had to stay vigilant, always. Or at least, it was those moments he would focus on. Not what came afterward. From then on, when he let himself think about this night, he would picture his aunt’s bare, gnarled feet in the grass. Her lumbering gait as she approached the cheetah, which hunched, coiled, its purr — or growl — audible even from the house. The pink bonnet on her head, the yellow overcoat on her shoulders, and the swing of her hand off her hip that told him she was dancing.

This shouldn’t have been hard. I mean, a strange tale inspired by Poe should be like breathing encouraged by air, right?

Maybe that was the problem. Great and terrible and awe-inspiring as he can be, Poe has become the Pachelbel of horror, so ubiquitous and familiar as to be drained, if not of his own impact, at least of his power to spark.

At least, that’s how it was for me. When first contacted for this anthology, I went straight to “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat.” They are all as grand as I remembered, and also over-familiar. So I started to read around in some of the stories I remembered less well.

Finally, in desperation, I turned to pieces I’d never before encountered and discovered “Morning on the Wissahicon.” There, I found first that universal writer’s longing to get off the well-traveled path, to discover — primarily by walking, and getting lost — hidden places where adventures are possible and stories flourish. Near the end, I came across the following anecdote:

“I saw, or dreamed that I saw, standing upon the extreme verge of the precipice, with neck out-stretched, with ears erect, and the whole attitude indicative of profound and melancholy inquisitiveness, one of the oldest and boldest of those identical elks which had been coupled with the red men of my vision…

A negro emerged from the thicket, putting aside the bushes with care, and treading stealthily. He bore in one hand a quantity of salt, and holding it towards the elk, gently yet steadily approached… The negro advanced; offered the salt; and spoke a few words of encouragement or conciliation. Presently, the elk bowed and stamped, and then lay quietly down and was secured with a halter.

Thus ended my romance of the elk. It was a pet of great age and very domestic habits, and belonged to an English family occupying a villa in the vicinity.”

Immediately, a memory surfaced, and a Baltimore memory, to boot: visiting a farm in the suburbs populated with exotic animals. Llamas, I think. Snakes. Definitely buffalo. There may have been an elephant. I visited this farm in the company of two aunts I dearly loved, one of whom is dead now. I asked the surviving aunt whether I was misremembering, and where that farm was. And she told me a story about the day the buffalo got out. And suddenly— finally — I had myself a Poe-derived tale to tell…

Content

The Pikesville Buffalo
By Glen Hirshberg