When the Nines Roll Over by David Benioff Page A

father removed his glasses and hung them, by one stem, from the neck of his undershirt. He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and then laughed.
    â€œAll mammals blink, Mackenzie. It keeps the eyeballs from drying out.”
    â€œWink, not blink. He winked at me.”
    A sad smile lingered on his face as he regarded me. It was the Smile for Mackenzie, the expression he reserved for me alone. This is what you need to know about my father: He was a man who made a living killing animals, though he adored animals and disdained men. But I was his love’s son and that gave me immunity from disdain, immunity from the cool hunter’s stare he aimed at everyone else. His turn in this world was far from gentle, but he was gentle with me.

    Nobody saw the lion for the next five days. Wildlife experts on television speculated on his disappearance and proposed various possibilities for his whereabouts, but nobody knew anything. My father met with the chief of police and the mayor to coordinate the hunt. He inspected the sites where the lion had been seen and carefully studied all the eyewit ness reports. In the terse interviews he gave to carefully chosen members of the press, he urged the public to remain cautious. He believed that the lion was still on the island of Manhattan.
    Six days after I first saw the lion, on a humid afternoon—the kind where every surface is wet to the touch, as if the city itself were sweating—Butchko called and invited me to come over. I had forgotten that I gave him my number, and at first I was reluctant to go all the way downtown in the miserable August heat. But I had nothing better to do and I was curious to get a look at his one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar apartment.
    I met him on the stoop steps of his building. Before I could speak he raised a finger to his lips and motioned me to sit beside him. The hysterical dialogue of a Mexican telenovela spilled from the open window of the first-floor apartment. I let the language wash over me, the rolling r ’s, the sentences that all seemed to rhyme. Every few minutes I’d recognize a word and nod. Loco! Cerveza! Gato!
    â€œTe quiero,” said Butchko, practicing the accent during a commercial break. “Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero.”
    â€œYou speak Spanish?”
    â€œI’m learning. Gregory Santos said bilinguality is one of the seven steps to the full-out shudders.”
    Bilinguality? “What’s the full-out—”
    The soap opera came on again and Butchko hushed me. We listened to a hoarse-voiced man calm a distraught woman. A swell of violins and cellos seemed to signal their reconciliation and I imagined the kiss, the woman’s eyes closed, tears of happiness rolling down her face as the darkly handsome man wrapped her in his arms. Butchko nodded solemnly.
    When the show ended he led me into the brownstone and up a poorly lit staircase, pointing out various obstacles to avoid: a dogshit footprint, a toy car, broken glass. At the top of the last flight of stairs he pushed open a graffiti-tagged door and led me onto the tarpapered roof. A water tower squatted on steel legs alongside a shingled pigeon coop.
    â€œYou hang out up here?” I asked.
    â€œThis is home,” he said, closing the door behind me and securing it with a combination lock. “Look,” he said, pointing. “That’s a pigeon coop.”
    â€œI know it’s a pigeon coop.”
    â€œAsk me why it has two doors.”
    The coop was windowless and low-slung, narrow and long, hammered together of gray weathered boards. Splits in the wood had been stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation. A yellow door hung crooked in its frame on one end; I circled around the coop and found an equally crooked red door on the opposite end.
    â€œWhy does it have two doors?”
    â€œBecause if it had four doors it would be a pigeon sedan.”
    He was so happy with the joke his face turned bright red. He