The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [107]
“Drop your weapon NOW let go of that ax you want to get shot?”
The savage girl doesn’t drop the hatchet. She crouches a little, maybe preparing to pounce.
“Don’t shoot her,” Ursula says. “She doesn’t know . . .”
“ ‘Doesn’t know’ what?” the small-toothed cop shouts at her.
Ursula pauses. Doesn’t know language? Doesn’t know what a gun is? Can a person will herself into forgetting these things? Ursula doesn’t know what the savage girl does or doesn’t know.
“Is she crazy?” the cop says. “Do you know this woman? Is she nuts?”
She thinks she will say no but the word that comes out is yes. Her heart squirms behind the bars of her chest. She looks up at the savage girl, wishing she could apologize. The savage girl stares at the cop pointing the gun at her, who now backs off slowly. Her ravaged face has become strangely expressive. Her lips are bunched into a small, tight ring. Her eyebrows are lowered. Her eyes burn. The expression is rage.
“What about you?” the male cop says. “Are you nuts, too?”
“No, Officer.”
“What are you doing running at me like that? You wanna die or something?”
“I’m sorry,” Ursula says.
“If I stop pointing my gun at you are you gonna pull any battle-axes out of that big coat of yours?”
“No, Officer.”
The gun comes down, but it stays in his hand as he backs up to the squad car and reaches in for the radio. Ursula slowly lowers her hands as he requests assistance.
“What has she done, Officer?” Ursula says.
“Isn’t waving an ax at a police officer enough for you?”
“Yes, but—”
“How about killing this lady’s dog and wearing it around like a bonnet?”
“Aha.”
“Yeah. Aha.”
The former dog owner looks at her through the back window of the squad car. She has stopped crying, but her face is still puffy and red. Ursula looks back over at the savage girl. The dog’s head is perched on top of her head at a jaunty angle now, wrinkled black nose and hollowed-out snout upturned, gray neck and back fur covering the back of the savage girl’s own neck like a foreign-legion cap. Looking carefully, Ursula can make out patches of the gray fur elsewhere as well—around the girl’s forearms and sewn together with different-colored hides into the tight-fitting coat she’s made. The fur leggings and boots seem free of gray fur; they’re mostly brown and black.
Now that the woman cop has backed off and lowered her gun slightly, the scarred material of the savage girl’s face has begun to recongeal into an expression of calm, her eyes unfocusing slightly, as though the particularities of the cop were so offensive that the general outline were all she could bear. As the sirens in the distance grow louder, the male cop settles back against the squad car, watching the savage girl with raised eyebrows and scratching the back of his neck with his free hand. He does not immediately respond when the strawberry blonde gets out of the back of the squad car holding a nightstick by the wrong end. He does not yet move, but his face begins to register confusion as the woman screams and charges at the savage girl, a strawberry-blueberry blur, the leather thong of the raised, upside-down nightstick flying behind like a banner.
The savage girl turns to face her opponent, the ragged dog’s head turning with her. She leaps from the bench, already swinging the hatchet as she lands. But the berry woman comes up fast inside the hatchet’s arc, and the blade overreaches her goose down–padded shoulder as her nightstick connects with the savage girl’s side. They