by John Brantingham

A little girl named Andrea spots a cougar out of her apartment window late one night and names it Susan despite the fact that it is male, Susan who stalks the northern edge of Los Angeles, who scientists have not found yet, whose range includes Northridge and Moorpark and all the semi-wild places nearby, Susan who follows Edgar as he hikes up through the Santa Clarita Valley. Susan will not attack Edgar but just watches, making sure that Edgar does not attack him, having the thoughts that mountain lions do about the chores necessary for survival. He watches as Edgar comes to a small homemade monument of rocks and crosses that lies near the river and wonders what it is there for.

What neither Edgar or Susan know is that this is the place where the St. Francis Dam once stood and late night in 1928 crumbled, flooding the towns between this place and this Pacific Ocean and killing hundreds who slept in its path. Neither Edgar nor Susan know that in their weekly commutes they cross and recross this killing field and that most nights Susan beds down in it and that Edgar, whose apartment is in Fillmore would have died in the water had he lived there then, and that his daughter Andrea would have too, even though she no longer lives with Edgar but with her mother and her new husband in Saugus.

Edgar is killing time, waiting for the moment he can pick up his daughter and drive her back to his home for the last half of the week. When he does, his ex-wife is there to meet him and to tell him that he shouldn’t be late with Andrea again, and in his ex-wife’s defense, he was two hours late last time, but only because he has to live in Fillmore where his sister owns an apartment that she lets him rent cheaply, and he works in Los Angeles and that day someone on the freeway spilled coffee on his suit and veered into a semi and Edgar sat staring at the Audi in front of him as he spat and cursed and pounded on his steering wheel because one of the reasons he was divorced in the first place was that he was never around, and he knew that the ex was going to bring that up, and she does now, and he does his best to keep himself from yelling at her, but his best isn’t very good, and he has one of those screaming fights that they used to have in the bedroom, but this time on the front sidewalk in front of everyone.

It takes an hour and a half for Edgar to get home, and he has to talk Andrea out of her tears in the back seat. The whole time, he’s planning the class he will teach badly tomorrow, badly because he will be exhausted from this drive that he does every single damn day. When Andrea is finally calmed down, she tells him of the big cat she saw last night named Susan, how she woke up at two in the morning, looked out the window and saw it hop over the back fence in a single leap and then it was gone. 

She does not know of course, that in the next week, Susan will make the same trip her father has made this afternoon, or nearly so anyway, waiting for hours to gain the courage in the middle of the night to bolt under a freeway overpass, which is better than the freeway itself, but Susan is driven by a need for survival as great as Edgar’s, and by the end of the week, he is crouching outside a park in Fillmore hoping for prey to wander by while Edgar is telling Andrea to pack up her things.

She complains that she didn’t get to see him this week.

He says, I know baby. I’m sorry about that. I had work to do. He thinks of the miles he drove in traffic. He thinks about the Friday night text from the ex that made him weep in traffic.

She complains that his place is too small, that she wants her own bedroom, not just his bed while he sleeps in the living room. 

He says, I’m working on that baby. Though he’s not, and he can’t see a way that he’ll ever be able to rent a bigger place or a place closer to work or one closer to his daughter. Instead, he’ll wander across this city, back and forth with the same range as the mountain lion and the flood, doing what he can to make it to the next day. This afternoon, he will have Andrea back to her mother on time, and he’ll apologize and she will too, and then he’ll go back to the hiking spot with the homebrewed monument because the traffic will have built up, and he might as well hike. Instead of hiking, he’ll sit in his car, lean back his seat and close his eyes.

He will dream of his daughter and his job. He will dream of his drive. He will dream of a mountain lion hiding from people who never give him a second thought. He will dream of a flood that overwhelms him and churns him across this city. In his dream, he wants to scream and just be let out. In his dream, he cannot even die.