The Boy By: Mary Pastorello

The boy stirred. He turned over several times to try to escape the white flash of light that streamed in from under the bedroom shade that had not been fully pulled down the night before. He lay in bed another minute or two before throwing his legs over and sliding off the mattress, landing in a pile on the carpet in his room, a sheet wrapped around one ankle. Being 9, he wasn’t at all upset about the way his day was starting, kicked off the unruly bedsheet and made his way to the kitchen, with a stop first in the hallway bathroom.

It was Saturday and the house was still quiet - his father already having left for his shift much earlier that morning, well before any pesky light had infiltrated the boy’s home, when the boy and his older sister were still sleeping and while his mother (who liked her mornings “slower” as she would often grunt whenever he or his sister tried to rouse her looking for something they needed for school) also slept.

The boy relished mornings like this. He enjoyed their quiet and stillness. They were when he was most relaxed. His father, stressed and worn from a shift at a job that, “sucked and sucked the life out of him,” as he often said with a chuckle and a beer in hand after a particularly taxing day, wasn’t around to make him nervous. The boy’s love for his father was complicated: equal parts fear, respect, and affection.

Neither was his sister around to actively ignore him, which hurt his feelings more than he’d admit. When they were younger they had played together often, but now that she was in high school there was no more of that. She was in her room often. With the door closed. He never really saw her anymore.

His mother would sleep for many more hours. The house was “his.”

The boy stood in the middle of his kitchen and took a deep breath. He sauntered across the grooved, yellow linoleum floor, reached up to the oak cabinet with his right hand and grabbed a red plastic cereal bowl. With his left hand he cleared a space among the prior night’s dishes and empty beer bottles to make room for his bowl. Having found some cereal in the back of the pantry, he filled up his bowl, added the last of the milk from the lime-colored Frigidaire, grabbed a spoon from the drying rack and took his breakfast to the couch in the next room.

Flopping onto the soft, clumpy, blue couch, he ate. His next task would be to locate the remote control, a task that typically required removing the couch cushions. As the boy pulled the spoon with a last cereal bite out of his mouth and prepared to search, he froze. His eye caught something outside of the rear window. Rising very slowly from the couch, he took three measured and controlled steps toward a bay of windows facing the backyard. In the middle of the yard stood an animal, unsteady on its feet. The boy parted the curtains to get a better look.

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Earlier that morning, the coyote had made the very tragic mistake of attempting to partake in a kill that wasn’t his. He had tousled with another member of the pack and lost, forfeiting the meal and sacrificing an eye in the process. In pain and stripped of pride, the creature had recoiled to a pack of nearby hedges in the suburban neighborhood. Only after several hours, did he notice that the pack had left him. He was alone.

From inside the hedge, the coyote gathered his strength and made a feeble attempt to stand. Instinct told him that he needed to rejoin the pack. He fell. His left eye, or what had been, still bled but less than before, the blood having dried mostly in the socket area. A gash on his right check, however, continued to ooze red, with fresh blood running over the thin flap of flesh and fur that hung from the side of his face. After a fourth attempt, the coyote got to his feet.

The coyote carefully stepped out from under the hedges and walked across the open backyard. In the middle of the yard, stood a small metal fire pit that the boy’s family had used in summertime to gather more safely with neighbors. Once the snow had come, the gatherings had stopped but the small fire pit still stood, plastic chairs encircling it, now rusted and covered in snow. The coyote, trailed by drops of crimson, made it to the fire pit and collapsed against the metal structure, perhaps from exhaustion or because the pit afforded some cover and protection. It was at this point that the boy had noticed him from the couch.

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The boy spent the morning stealing looks out of the window. When his mother and sister finally woke and made their way into the kitchen, each stumbling toward the coffee pot but an hour apart, he said nothing about the coyote. Instead, he had gone to his room to collect a pair of birdwatching binoculars his grandmother had given him the year before and a notebook and pencil. While his sister spent the morning in her room and his mother watched a blaring television from bed, the boy took notes on the animal, noting when it lifted its head or moved in any way.

At 1 o’clock, the boy decided the coyote was hungry. Back to the fridge, the boy pulled out an opened package of bologna. Thinking for a moment, he took a piece of white bread and squeezed it around a slice of the deli meat. Making sure his mother and sister were still on the other side of the home, he moved to the backdoor off the kitchen, slowly opened it, steadied himself and threw the meat-ball at the coyote. He raced back to his position at the bay window. There, he saw the ball had landed maybe only a foot from the coyote’s back leg. With a full heart, the boy witnessed the coyote lift his head, turn and grab the lunch. The boy smiled.

By 2 o’clock, the boy’s father had returned. The boy, knowing his father would not be in a good mood as he’d just come home from a long day, had retreated to his room when he heard his father’s pick-up pull in the driveway. He hopped onto his bed and began to read a weathered, well-creased comic book he’d already read many times, though his thoughts wandered often to the injured animal in the yard.

********************************* The boy stiffened. He knew the sound. He’d heard it many times before visiting his father’s family in summers past. Doors opened. One slammed shut. Immediately, horror-filled, the boy understood what had happened. The comic book fell from his hands onto his lap. The boy did not need to get out of bed to know that his father had shot the wounded coyote. The boy turned over and cried silently into his pillow. A freight train sounded off in the distance barreling down the faraway tracks.