Feral Hearts

W

hen my friend Dougie found a key to a storage unit in Glen Burnie, his first thought was about the bodies that must have been hidden out there. That was Dougie, always jumping to the worst conclusion, like the time in ninth grade when Mr. Toban caught us trying to put sugar in his gas tank. Dougie had all but resigned himself to a life of crime before I managed to talk us out of trouble that day. It was the same way with that storage key. Where I saw a chance to make a quick buck, a free rummage through someone else’s stuff, he could only dream up horrors, the kind of nefarious shit he read about in all those true crime novels he loved so much. What we found out there was somewhere in the middle, I guess. A tried-and-true lesson that the great city of Baltimore is always offering up to its citizens: never drive all the way to Glen-fucking-Burnie unless you absolutely have to.

Dougie had been out walking his abominable Shih Tzu down in Fells Point when he stumbled upon an estate sale. Brownstone, mid-century decor, the kind of place where you’d expect to find something good, but I’d been there myself earlier in the day and didn’t turn up anything, just a bunch of overpriced china and an oil painting of a chubby girl with a harelip. By the time he called, I was halfway to Havre de Grace.

“Havre de Grace?” Dougie croaked into the phone. “What the hell are you doing out there?”

“Police auction,” I said, pulling my van to the side of the road. It was a warm summer day, and the wind spilling through the trees made me want to roll down the windows and have a smoke, even though I’d quit going on twenty years.

“I might have something for you,” he said. Gabby the Shih Tzu yapped in the background.

Dougie lowered his voice as he recounted the details to me. He’d found the key in a case of socket wrenches. Next to the key was an address scrawled on the back of a library card and a faded picture of a young woman on a sailboat. Joanne ’79, the picture read. Dougie couldn’t tell by the items at the estate sale if Joanne was the deceased or not, but something about the image of her on the sailboat, frail and sunburnt, made Dougie think of death. 

“It was the eyes,” he said, still whispering. “It was like she was looking at me from beyond the veil or something.” 

“I think you watch too many movies,” I said. 

I sighed, massaging my neck. Business had been slow down at the pawn shop this summer, but this might have been the break I’d been waiting for. People killed for first dibs on a lot unseen.

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” I said. I made a U-turn in the middle of the road and headed back into the city.

It had been Dougie’s idea to put sugar in Mr. Toban’s Caprice after he’d given him an F on a history exam. It seemed like overkill to me, but grades were a Big Deal in Dougie’s house, so I went along with the plan. We used to look out for each other back then. Of course, Dougie was just Dougie back then, not Dr. Derstine. 

#

When I picked Dougie up on Eastern Avenue, he looked like he’d just walked out of one of those day spas up in Towson. Fake tan and forehead gleaming from his monthly injections. Carla’s influence, no doubt. 

I might have looked every bit of my sixty-three years, coffee teeth and sagging three different ways to shit, but at least people didn’t laugh at me behind my back. Not that Dougie cared what our old friends thought of him. He hadn’t even bothered to RSVP for our 40th reunion.

Dougie poked his head in the passenger window, his grin souring as he surveyed the mess. 

“Sure you don’t want to take my car?” He pointed over to his Tesla parked down the street.

“As long as you don’t mind strapping whatever we find out there to the top.” I smirked.

“Fine,” he huffed. He clutched Gabby to his chest and slid into the seat next to me, kicking aside empty soda cans and fast-food wrappers on the floorboard.

We crawled through traffic along the Inner Harbor towards the parkway. At a red light, a kid wearing a hoodie tried to wash my windows, but I managed to fend him off by turning my wipers on full blast. The kid scowled at me and moved to the next car.

“A bit harsh, don’t you think?” Dougie frowned.

“What, you don’t have squeegee boys in your neighborhood?” I chuckled.

Dougie hated it when I brought up the mansion in Roland Park, but I couldn’t help myself. Jesus, the debt he must have been in to pay for that stupid house. All just to impress Carla.

“I just think these kids haven’t been given a fair shake is all,” he said in that serious tone people used when they were pretending to give a shit, which Dougie certainly did not.

I’d seen Dougie kick a busker’s guitar case off the sidewalk once out of pure spite, scattering quarters onto the road and down the rain grates. The kid was just trying to make a buck, and there Dougie was screaming at him to get a haircut and a real job. All this because the kid probably reminded Dougie of his own son, God rest his soul.

The light turned green, and we lurched forward. Gabby put her front paws on the dashboard and whimpered at the sound of the moving traffic. It didn’t seem like an animal suited for the city. Then again, it didn’t seem like an animal suited for any environment.

“That thing better not piss on my seats,” I said, honking at the line of cars in front of me.

I merged onto the parkway, and traffic finally picked up. We headed south from downtown, passing by power lines and street lamps strangled in ivy. Young men loitered around a body shop called Tint Man. Christ the King Catholic Church advertised mass in Spanish on its marquee, Honeybee Liquors deals on 18-packs.

Further down, we crossed over the Patapsco River. A row of orange and gray tents stretched down the filthy banks. A young guy with a ratty beard wandered along the water’s edge in his bare feet, his reflection mirroring that jerky saunter only a heroin addict could master. It could have been Dougie’s kid down there, if he hadn’t already met his fate.

Dougie peered down at the kid. I wondered if he saw it, too. The ghostly likeness.

“What do you think we’re gonna find out there?” he asked, his eyes drifting back to the road.

“Junk mostly,” I said.

Dougie pulled out the picture of the woman on the sailboat, cradling it in his hands. I saw why he’d been drawn to it in the first place.

“She looks like Barbara,” I said. Barbara was Dougie’s first wife. Pete’s mother.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he murmured.

“How’s Carla?” I asked.

“Keeping busy,” Dougie said with a shrug. “She’s got this new mission to save the raccoons of Druid Hill Park.”

“I didn’t know they needed saving,” I said, trying not to sound too amused. Dougie was touchy about Carla’s pet projects ever since I made fun of her last one, some nonsense about cleaning up Jones Falls.

“Apparently, they’re getting more aggressive,” Dougie said. “Just last week, they attacked a guy feeding the pigeons.”

“Now there’s a problem,” I said. “Maybe she can get those fucking birds to stop shitting on my van.”

“We could just start eating them, you know, like the French do,” Dougie said with a chuckle.

“Could become the next delicacy,” I said. “Lake trout and squab.”

I turned off the parkway and onto a residential street lined with split levels and bungalows striped in plastic siding. RVs and crabbing boats covered in tarps crowded the street. The empty sidewalks and vacant yards set me on edge. It was like the whole neighborhood had gone inside and was watching our next move.

 “If we do find something out here, it’ll be stealing,” I said, rolling up to a four-way stop. “You okay with that?”

“I wouldn’t have called you if I wasn’t.”

#

Sandpiper Storage was set in the back of an abandoned industrial lot, shrouded in trees. To my relief, there wasn’t a manager on site, just a map at the entrance. Unit number twelve was near the back. We crept through the empty storage lanes, gravel crunching softly under my tires. 

“What if someone else has a key?” Dougie asked, like it had just dawned on him.

“Then someone else has a key,” I said, rolling down my window. Traffic from the parkway hummed in the distance, the murmur of landing planes. “I don’t really see your point.”

“You just told me we were stealing,” Dougie said. “They could call the cops.”

“You couldn’t imagine the odd shit that people bring into my shop.” I turned down the last row of units. “I had a guy try to pawn the dentures out of his own mouth once. A box of wrenches with a key inside? That’s nothing. I could write that off in a second. Cops or no cops.”

“But what if the original owner didn’t know the key was in there?”

“Finders keepers.”

I pulled up to number twelve and killed the engine. Gabby stood up, trembling as she marched her front paws against the dashboard.

“I just don’t know if it’s a good idea is all.” He shook his head.

This was the problem with guys like Dougie. They made their million and retired early but never thought about what they were going to do afterwards. Dougie was probably just bored when he called me today, looking to have a bit of fun. I had bigger problems, though. There were lights to keep on in the shop, a goddamn mortgage that was going to follow me into the grave, and a kid down in Jacksonville who only ever called when he needed money.

“You don’t have to come inside if you don’t want to, but I didn’t drive all the way out here just to turn around,” I said, grabbing the storage key from the console and swinging open the driver door. “Now are you coming or not?”

I circled around the van, twirling the key around my index finger. The passenger door creaked open, and Dougie slunk outside, Gabby trailing behind him and looking just as pathetic.

I peered back down the alleyway to be sure no one was coming. There was nothing I hated more than seeing the ever-expanding vacancy in this city, but sometimes it served its purpose. The last thing we needed right now was someone stumbling into this dipshit little B and E we were about to commit.

I stuck the key in the padlock and leaned against the sliding door. The lock didn’t budge at first, so I pressed harder against the shutter, jiggling the key around. When I did, Gabby started to whine.

“What’s the matter baby? Do you need to go to the bathroom?” Dougie crouched beside his dog.

“Goddamn thing,” I muttered, struggling with the key.

“Do you smell that?” Dougie craned his head back, sniffing into the air.

“Smell what?”

“Ammonia. Like a vet clinic.”

“I think your imagination is getting the best of you again,” I said, finally getting the key to turn, but I smelled it too now, the prickle of vinegar mixed with rancid butter. I slid the lock off the shackle and tossed it onto the ground.

Gabby fell into a barking fit, lunging at the lock in the grass. When she did, something banged inside the storage unit. Dougie and I froze, staring at each other.

“We should go,” Dougie stammered. Gabby’s barks grew more deranged, and when Dougie tried to pick her up, she snapped at his hand.

“Can you shut that thing up?” I pressed my ear to the thin metal shutter. A faint scratching sound came from inside, like someone walking through high grass.

I hovered by the door, straining to hear the noise again, but it had fallen silent inside the unit again. I’d heard stories of whole families living inside these things, caught somewhere between the street and a real home. If there really were people in there, they were locked inside. We couldn’t just leave now.

I knocked against the shutter, and the scratching sound returned.

“Screw this,” Dougie screeched, yanking Gabby by her leash as he darted back into the van. Of course he would leave me to do it alone.

When it came time to do the deed with Mr. Toban’s car, Dougie wimped out then, too. “My arm hurts,” he said, shoving the bag of sugar into my chest. “Besides, you’re better at this kind of stuff than I am.” Everyone loved trouble until they actually had some on their hands.

I pulled up the shutter and took a step back. The smell came all at once, then in nauseating waves, so strong that I had to screw my eyes shut to keep them from burning. When they finally adjusted to the foulness, I covered my nose and mouth with my shirt and crept inside.

There were rows of cages on either side of the unit. Animals inside them, dogs maybe, but we would have heard them barking. I moved closer to the scuttling mass.

 A pair of yellow eyes peered back at me, violent and fearful. It was a big cat, but like none I’d ever seen before, its bronzed fur streaked with black around its eyes and nose. Hair sprouted from the tips of its ears like an owl. An owl cat. Was that a real thing? I leaned closer. The animal hissed, flashing massive vampire teeth.

“Jesus.” I stumbled backward, nearly smacking into the cage behind me and sending the other cats into a frenzy.

My own instinct took over, and I scrambled out from the row of cages and back into the daylight, panting for fresh air. The smell followed me out, along with the sound of all those claws against metal.

Dougie poked his head out the passenger window.

“What the hell’s going on?” he shouted, eyes widening. Seeing the horror creep across his dumb, manicured face made me think again of those demon cats inside, the claws that nearly dug into my shoulder. That fucking smell. I just needed to catch my breath, but before I could, I burst into laughter, hiccupping for air and feeling like I was going to faint.

Dougie was looking at me now like I’d gone crazy, which maybe I had. But I couldn’t take the sight of his face without falling back into a fit of laughter. That’s what they said about people who got too much work done, right? They came out looking like cats. I put my hands on my knees, laughing harder.

When I did finally catch my breath, I rested my hands on the top of my head, feeling like I’d just finished a long jog. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt the life drumming in my chest like that. The doctor told me I had a weak heart, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe the palpitations I felt late into the night were something else, a feral rhythm of my own restless spirit. My heart knocking on the cage of my ribs like all those wildcats I’d just seen.

I used to think that getting old would come with some kind of wisdom, at the very least some ease to my hunger. Instead, it was pain that filled the hole of my lost appetite, chest pain, back pain, joint pain. An ache that struck deeper, when staring at my own reflection in the mirror and everything would suddenly snap into focus, and I saw myself for the sad, old man that I really was.

The rest of the time, I felt like the same kid that used to skip class and ride bicycles and dump sugar into my history teacher’s gas tank. I kept a sidelong view of myself, and the glimpses I did catch were always at a flattering angle. It was the same reason that Dougie got all that work done on his face, I guess. Neither of us was ready yet to face our years.

#

I guided Dougie back into the storage unit. The smell had subsided enough that we didn’t have to cover our mouths, but the air still pinched at the corners of my eyes. Dougie hovered in front of a cage, mesmerized by the strange-looking cats with tufted ears.

“Caracal,” he said.

“Cara-what?” I asked, inspecting the rest of the storage unit. There wasn’t much inside beyond the cages. A shelf with cleaning supplies and a box of soiled rags stood against the far wall.

“I think they’re from Africa,” Dougie said, leaning closer. “People keep them as pets sometimes, even though it’s illegal.” The cat hissed, and Dougie jumped back.

I sidled through the narrow row of cages towards the back of the storage unit, careful not to stir the animals again. Eyes gleamed back at me, hungry for sunlight and food.

A clipboard dangled from the shelf. I squinted, trying to read the looping handwriting in the dim light. It wasn’t English. I recognized some of the characters from the Russian delis near my house. I took the clipboard back to Dougie, hoping he might be able to decipher it.

“Cyrillic,” he said, furrowing his brow.

“I got that far,” I said, even though I’d forgotten the name of the alphabet. “What do you think it means?”

“I dunno.” Dougie shook his head. “But it looks like a schedule to me.” He pointed at the top-left corner of the page, where checkboxes sat next to a series of times and dates. 13:00, the first line read.

“What time is it?” The skin on my forearms prickled.

“Almost one,” he said.

“Shit,” I said, snatching back the clipboard and tossing it onto one of the cages.

I hurried Dougie outside, searching through the grass for the lock, but it was too late. I’d known this was a bad idea from the moment Dougie called me this morning, but I went with the plan anyway. Maybe I was just looking for a little adventure in the end, too.

A beige sedan came into view, rolling down the alleyway towards us. The car came to a stop behind our van, blocking the way out.

A tiny figure appeared from the passenger side. A boy, six or seven years old. A second figure emerged from the driver’s side, a man with a dark beard wearing a baseball cap.

“Wait here,” the man ordered the boy.

The boy disappeared back into the car, and the man approached us. His eyes peeked out between the thatch of his beard and the low brim of his hat. He was short, the slight hitch in his walk betraying an old sports injury or maybe a car accident.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked, his accent sharpening along the edges of his vowels. He took a step closer, and I caught a whiff of something gamey, the smell of a butcher shop on a hot day.

We were caught. Unless of course I could talk our way out of it.

“Joanne sent us,” I said, thinking of the woman in the picture.

“Who’s Joanne?” the man asked, eyeing the open door to the storage unit. “How did you get inside?”

“It was already open when we got here,” I said, my mind stumbling through a dozen dumb lies. “That’s why Joanne sent us.”

“Who’s Joanne?” the man asked again. He shook his head. “Never mind, I’m calling the boss.” He pulled out his phone.

“Wait,” I pleaded, holding out my hands.

The guy brought his kid with him today. He must have been at least halfway decent. I just needed to tell him the truth, the part that worked for us at least. “Joanne’s the one who gave us the key is what I meant to say.”

“My ex-wife,” Dougie chimed in. “Before she died.”

The man frowned, his expression caught somewhere between confusion and irritation.

“I can show you,” I said, gesturing towards the van. The man sighed, waving me off. It wasn’t like we could go anywhere with them blocking us in.

I jogged over to the van and fished out the picture and the library card from the glovebox. Gabby slept curled on the passenger seat, wheezing softly.

“Now you’re quiet,” I sneered.

I shut the glovebox and took the exonerating evidence back to the man. At least I hoped it was exonerating. The man turned the picture over in his hands, looking unsure of what to make of it. I handed him the library card with the address and the unit number scratched across the back.

“We’ve been divorced for nearly ten years now,” Dougie said. “They must have cleared the unit out and rented it to someone else.”

“I don’t know,” the man said, furrowing his brow as he gazed down at the woman on the sailboat. His thumb rested over the dial button on his phone.

The man’s son peeked his head around the side of my van. He was petite like his father, a mop of black hair falling just over his eyes. I gave him a little wave and smiled. The man snapped his head around.

“Go back to the car,” he said, but his son slunk toward us anyway, a smile creeping across his face.

The man said something in a language that didn’t quite sound like the Russian I heard in my neighborhood. Whatever he said, the boy didn’t seem to listen to this either, his grin widening as he raced over to his father’s side. The man bent over, and the boy whispered something into his ear.

The man turned back to us, looking sheepish.

“He wants to see the cats.”

#

Dougie and I unloaded grocery bags from the man’s trunk and carried them into the storage unit. Chuck roast and bottom round, two steaks for each cat, the man instructed us. We peeled back the cellophane and removed the steaks from their styrofoam splints, dropping them into a steel kitchen bowl.

The man let his son carry the bowl as he went from cage to cage, feeding the cats from a top hatch. Soon, the entire storage room was filled with the sound of smacking gums.

“Twice a day they eat like this,” the man said, returning to fill the bowl.

“Must get expensive,” I said, trying to make small talk.

The man seemed to have let his guard down now that we’d managed to convince him that we were just a couple harmless old farts, but his car still blocked us in, and the not-yet-made call to his boss dangled over us like a dark cloud waiting to drop rain.

“Sixty-four steaks per day, three hundred thirty-six a week,” the man said, like the calculations were part of some larger mantra of his secret profession. “And that’s just this location,” he trailed off, realizing that he shouldn’t be sharing this information with us.

“It’s nice that you can bring your son,” Dougie said, changing the conversation.

“He likes the caracals most of all,” the man said with a faint smile.

There were other animals in this operation then. I pictured pythons, caimans, and spider monkeys populating storage facilities across the city.

“My grandson’s eight,” Dougie said, peeling back the wrapper from a bottom round and tossing the meat into the bowl.

“You must be proud,” the man said. He ran his fingers through his beard, like he was thinking about his own future as a grandfather.

“I am,” Dougie said, stuffing the empty trays into a grocery bag and tying the handles shut. “This year’s been hard on him though—hard on all of us—since his father died.”

It was the first time I’d heard him mention Pete since the funeral. Even then, in the aftermath of his son’s overdose, Dougie only seemed capable of dredging up the distant past, telling stories of how Pete loved playing in the marching band, or the time he and his friends got caught trying to sneak into an Orioles game.

“He was young,” the man said, frowning.

“Heroin,” Dougie said, drying off the muck from his hands with a paper towel. “Nearly everything’s laced with fentanyl these days,” he continued, gazing out past the man and onto the grove of elm trees surrounding the lot. “The coroner said he’d only been dead an hour when we found him. That was always the part that killed me, you know? We were going to take him out to lunch that day, but then we had to push it back an hour because of traffic. I used to tell myself it was my fault. If only I’d gotten there sooner, he’d still be alive.” He let out a bitter laugh. “Stories like that are easier than the truth, I guess.”

The man seemed to be searching for words a second language wouldn’t permit. I wanted to tell him that there weren’t any. Dougie was probably just trying to garner more sympathy from the man so he’d forget about that call to the boss, but I couldn’t help but feel the loss all over again.

I used to see Pete at the corner store off Reisterstown Road, begging for change. I gave him five bucks once, not even thinking that he was going to use it for smack. He was Dougie’s kid for chrissake, not like those other junkies I saw lining the sidewalks of the methadone clinics and food pantries in our neighborhood.

The boy returned, brimming with wonder as he clutched his father’s hand.

“You’re mighty brave, hanging out with all those big, mean cats,” Dougie said, winking at the boy’s father.

“Molly is my favorite,” the boy said. He craned his head back, peering up at his father. “Can we feed her an extra one?”

“She’ll get too fat if we do,” the father said, patting his son on the head. When the boy protested, the man conceded. “She can have the leftover blood.”

My stomach turned at the sight of pink liquid swirling around at the bottom of the bowl, the smell of cat piss still lingering in the air.

We filled the bowl with the last cuts of steak, and the man guided his son back through the cages, this time letting the boy drop the pieces through the hatch. One of the cats snatched a piece still dangling from the boy’s hand, and the father yanked him away from the cage. The boy squealed with delight that he’d gotten so close to the animal.

When we’d finished, we carried out the empty bags to the man’s car. As he was pulling down the shutter, I caught one last glimpse of the wildcats, bristling with pent-up energy now that they’d been fed.

Part of me wanted to rush back inside and set them free, open every last cage and let them run into the wooded lots behind this one. The trees wouldn’t contain them for long. The owl cats of Glen Burnie would appear in the news every so often, slinking past security cameras and picking off dogs in their yards. An old woman would find one in her basement and call animal control, and they’d end up right back where they started.

The man locked the sliding door and pocketed the key we’d found with his own. He washed off his hands from a plastic gallon jug, offering to do the same for us. Dougie and I lined up next to his son as he splashed water onto our open palms.

“The meat in this country is diseased,” he said, shaking his head in disgust.

The man tossed the jug into his trunk and helped his son into the car, fastening the seat belt for him. He got into the car and started the engine with a soft whir.

He rolled down his window and waved us over.

“You were never here today,” the man said, his face darkening. “Next time, you won’t be so lucky.”

He rolled up his window and threw the car in reverse, backing down the alleyway. When he was finally gone, his car sputtering from the lot and down the road, I exhaled.

“I need a drink,” Dougie said, pressing his palms into his eyes and letting out a maniacal laugh.

“I need a whole bottle,” I said, wobbling back to the van. I fumbled through my pockets for my keys but couldn’t find them.

“Ignition,” Dougie said, pointing through the window.

“Right,” I said, leaning against the van.

A cool wind passed through the trees overhead. Storm clouds gathered along the waterfront.

It was a summer day just like this when they found Pete. Dougie called me babbling something about how they’d impounded his son’s car. I couldn’t make sense of what he was trying to tell me, until Carla took the phone from him. “He’s gone,” was all she said. She never mentioned that Dougie was the one who found him.

“Was that true?” I glanced at Dougie. “All that stuff you said about Pete?”

“Most of it,” he shrugged, and, for the first time I could remember, I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. A smile worked its way across the smooth ridge of his mouth, his too-white teeth gleaming in the dwindling sunlight. “Come on, let’s get that drink.”