Savage Girl by Jean Zimmerman Read Free Book Online Page B

“The huge crowds it attracts are unsophisticated in the extreme.”
    “My darling has followers,” spoke up the Sage Hen, “who come here night after night.” Her voice resembled a deep-seated squeaking.
    “Let her bathe, then let her be dressed again,” Freddy said, gesticulating with his hands, framing the imaginary scene below. “The spectators believe that the show is over. They shuffle and mill, unsure if they should leave.”
    “I always told ’im we should be selling waffles to the audience,” interjected Jake Woodworth.
    My father would not be deterred. “But it is a false ending. From outside the barn, a wolf howl is heard, then another, and soon a whole chorus. They crowd all about, surrounding us in the darkness, yowling.”
    Freddy threw his head back and let loose a full-throated howl. I had to laugh. Like many confident men of wealth, he had mastered a trick, one I had not yet gotten hold of myself, that of not caring what other men think.
    I glanced over my shoulder at Savage Girl, considering whether she might answer my father’s wolf call. But after looking mildly up at us, she returned to her drawing.
    “It is her wolf pack, returned to collect their own!” said my father, effectively imitating Dr. Scott’s theatrical delivery. “Chaos! Trembling! Abrupt banging sounds against the building walls!”
    “I shout out, ‘They have come for her!’” said Dr. Scott, getting swept up in the moment.
    “Your torch somehow snuffs itself out,” Freddy said. “Darkness. Forms move down below.”
    “I could get the dogs to do it,” Scott said.
    “And when the torch is finally relit . . .” Freddy said.
    “She is vanished,” Scott said.
    “She is vanished,” my father said, nodding.
    “Oh, my,” said the Sage Hen.
    “That’ll do,” pronounced Jake Woodworth. He let go a black stream of liquefied tobacco down onto the barn floor below.
    Dr. Scott was silent for a beat, his face straining with contained excitement. “Yes, that’s very good. I might use that.”
    He bowed to my father. “I yield to a dramaturge of superior abilities.”
    “But don’t you realize, Dr. Scott—or Calef, may I call you Calef?”
    Dr. Scott bowed again, preening.
    “You know, Cal, this is no life for a young girl.”
    Freddy said it gently, bringing us all back down to earth after the extravagance of his previous presentation. It was another marked characteristic I noticed in my father’s dealings among people, the ability to switch moods completely and abruptly. It made his interlocutors strain to follow him and thus put them in his power.
    He walked over to the railing. “No life for a young girl at all,” he repeated softly, looking down at Savage Girl.
    My father is an autodidact. A self-taught dabbler with a lot of time on his hands, and there can be nothing more annoying than that. At various times in his life, he studied Sanskrit, Swahili and the Occitan dialect of the Languedoc. Still, it surprised me a little to hear my father call out in a language I had never heard.
    “Kimaru, nai-bi,”
he said.
    The effect upon Savage Girl was immediate. It was as though she had touched the leads of a galvanic battery. She jerked her head around and stared at my father, a look of pure excitement seizing her features.
    “Kimaru, nai-bi,”
Freddy said again.
    Savage Girl let out a screech, a sound I had never before or since heard a human voice make.
    She rose to her feet, bounded across the barn, leaped up one of the pillars that held the balcony in place and, before any of us could react, had scrambled to the other side of the railing opposite my father, to where her face was inches away from his. She stood balancing there for a long moment, grinning, a wild-haired banshee.
    Then—my heart stopped—she back-flipped down to the floor of the barn with a resounding thump. Racing around the space like a madwoman, running on two feet and occasionally on four, she finished up by zipping suddenly into