Short Fiction: Forager

One of the shortest stories I’ve ever written clocks in at under 1500 words — a miracle, for me.

It’s based on a true story from some years ago, maybe the early to mid-’90s, the details of which I no longer remember. I do remember that the true story, too, took place in New York City. And without any hesitation at all, I can say I never forgot the most surprising ingredient in the story; that was part of the true story, as well.

Forager

Clay was lost that night somewhere way the hell out in the West 50s. Wind-blown, tacking erratically from one side to the other of the narrow cross streets, holding himself erect in painstaking dignity as he traversed the broad avenues. Muttering. Cursing the drivers of the rare passing cars. Enjoying but at the same time trying like hell to walk off the effects of the nearly full bottle of MD 20/20 that the teenage couple had left behind in the park when they fled, yelling, from his ragged bearded countenance suddenly rising up out of the bushes, fumbling with his stubborn, twisted zipper.

Shutting his eyes a moment, still in motion, he collided, kaboom, smack in the bull’s-eye of his goddam crotch with one of those goddam standpipes, and lurched, doubled over, around the corner of a building and into an alley. That’s when he saw it.

Somebody musta rammed the dumpster. Packa kids maybe — goddam animals (he grumbled, massaging his battered groin) — on a rampage. Whatever. But somehow here was this dumpster lying on its side, dented, the lid flipped open and guts strewn across the alley and out onto the sidewalk. And there it was, ankle-deep in trash: the bison.

Grazing, looked like. Snouting about in the soggy mashed-up wads of newsprint, styrofoam peanuts, the next-door restaurant’s garbage bags burst asunder with a week-old detritus of candlelit trysts and business hobnobbings. The beast looked up at Clay, pausing in its hunt for God knew what; the huge brown eyes with the crescent slivers of bloodshot white around their rims, the mournful pouches of flesh in which the eyes floated, the hairy sag of its jowl and gleaming moist black T of its nose — its whole being for the moment attentive, focused on Clay’s presence. Seeming to gauge his significance.

About midpoint in Clay’s digestive tract he felt a bubble forming. Jesus, “bubble” nothing, a whole goddam blimp. He rubbed a gray hand over his midriff. His stomach rumbled, and an acid flare burst at the back of his throat.

A bison. A bison, for chrissake. Buffalo. Staring at Clay with those big cow eyes like the thing never seen a human being before. And in the gloom beneath the dark mangy hanging gardens of its chest, lying as if on a placemat in the center of what had once been a slick magazine cover, there was what looked to Clay to be an entire, like, uneaten even unbitten-into half of a goddam sandwich.

At a nearby instersection, a truck ran a red light and was nearly rammed by an old dark-brown Ford station wagon whose maddened driver blew his horn, belatedly, the entire length of the block. Fool wake up the whole neighborhood. Another truck bounded and rebounded over a metal plate covering a pothole, a distant cannonade.

Clay glared at the animal, glanced down at the half-sandwich. The sandwich seemed to grow as he looked at it, efflorescing like an airbag. Light not too good here in this alley but the thing looked like it might even be a hero for chrissake. Big fat roll, some kinda pale pink meat, maybe some cheese. Tomato even. Lettuce. Did bison eat lettuce? Suppose it thought it was grass, like, prairie grass or some goddam thing?

He clenched what were left of his teeth, the stubble of his beard bristling (he hoped) pugnaciously. He stamped his feet, sucked in a huge breath, and bellowed, “Hoo!” Waving his arms in case the beast failed to grasp the obvious. “Hey now, haw! Go on, outta here, hey boy ha!”

The expression on the bison’s face did not change. It did not look curious, it did not look hostile or defensive or even wary, and it sure as hell did not look like it was about to move away from the sandwich.

Pausing to catch his breath, Clay licked his lips. Something in his mouth, some little nodule of something what the hell could that be he hadn’t had any goddam food in there for two days now, maybe three. Maybe a scrap of flesh from his own ruined mouth, heh, figures don’t it, eating himself. He spat, deliberately, in the direction of the bison’s face. Fell way short, though, down by the left front hoof. Splashing it.

“Hey now!” Clay yelled again, but without much conviction this time. The bison — evidently assigning to Clay a waning value as an object of interest — seemed to shrug, lowered its head, and resumed digging about in the garbage. Its right front hoof stirred, shifted, flattened an open bag of corn chips; stale golden flakes poofed listlessly in every direction.

Jesus. At least the stupid animal didn’t seem interested in the sandwich but suppose it stepped on that too? Gotta do — gotta do something — gotta do something fast.

Clay planted his feet, clenched his fists, leaned into a crouch, shook his head in an attempt to clear it of a sudden excelsior of vertigo. The bison and the dumpster converged into a single dark shadow, swam apart again. Clay swayed forward a bit, swayed back. Staggering, fists outstretched like toy battering rams, he charged.

In the seconds before he completely crossed the short distance, Clay reflected on the wisdom of this course of action. Whatever else it might accomplish, ramming a buffalo’s forehead with your fists was probably one fast painful way to break the goddam things — Jesus, didn’t these animals, like, play by butting heads with each other? Probably like punching a a goddam statue even if it was carpeted, what the hell wrong with him he crazy or what. And suppose it took a blow to the head as some kind of primal challenge: could Clay survive a mating battle with a goddam buffalo?

At the last possible instant he swerved and opened his fists, the fingers and palms of his hands slapping rapidly thup-thup not against the bison’s forehead but against the black matted hump on its shoulder. Rebounding, he grunted, staggered back and to one side, falling against a hard-rubber thirty-gallon trash container on the opposite wall of the alley and then, splash, onto his hands, elbows, and knees in a puddle of something pale-green and bilious. The lid popped off as the trash can itself toppled over, spewing over him an assortment of fast-food bags, candy and cigarette wrappers, napkins, theater and parking-garage ticket stubs, a busted Walkman, and some chicken bones wrapped in crumbling aluminum foil.

He sat back against the wall, toweling the foul liquid from his hands with the ragged fabric of his shirt. Blinking, the sense and wind kinda, whoo, knocked outta him for a moment, he squinted across the alley at the bison.

It had been affected scarcely at all by the collision; its hooves remained planted right where they had been, its granite-monumental body still facing the same way. It had, however, turned its head in Clay’s direction and was now staring at him, hard. From within its shaggy immensity issued a rumble, a sigh, the drumming of a vast disappointment, and it faced back to the street. Again it appeared to shrug but this time instead of returning to its grazing it shuddered and, like a tank, began to move forward out of the alley. Shaking (Clay was sure) its goddam head. And as it passed like the shadow of an eclipse over the sandwich, a cascade of yellow spite spouted down from its underside and all over the most food that Clay had probably seen in, like, whole goddam weeks. Oblivious, the bison lumbered onto the sidewalk, turned right, and plodded out of sight behind the building’s brick wall.

Sheeeit.

Clay sat there motionless for a few minutes more, watching the steam rise over the sandwich in a parody of a heated meal, sensing but not quite conscious of the chilly dampness of the torn trousers fabric against his knees. A roach darted into a split in the sole of his right shoe.

Slowly, mechanically, he unwrapped the foil from around the chicken bones. He sucked at the greasy, cartilaginous joints, dug with his fingers at the spaces between the bones, finally sucked at the fingers themselves. He leaned back against the wall, muttering, stared again at the soggy mess in the middle of the alley. His vision blurred. Alcoholic slumber dropped on him like a coarse crazy paint-spattered tarpaulin from the ceiling; teetering, falling onto his right side and into the puddle, he slept, dreams turbulent, lips and feet and hands a-twitch, horizonless tan grassy hills rolling away beneath and behind him, dusty cumuli roiling up and powdering his flanks, buffeted on all sides, borne across the night on the shoulders of a deep, booming, everlasting thunder.