Brown fronds tumble after cars and cut rasp on the blacktop and curl in the parched ditches and I wonder whatever happened to September. She was heavy set and she played softball and she could beat Ricky Carrington, the fastest guy in the neighborhood, in a foot race. I could never tell if September was joking or serious. She walked around with a brown canvas rucksack on her shoulder. Once she greeted me at the bus stop with a punch to the belly. It was common knowledge that September grew up in a household where her mother beat her father, regularly. And sometimes she would talk at the bus stop, until the bus came, about how she just wanted her father to ball his skinny fists, one time, until his knuckles got white and sharp, and knock some sense into her mother so she would shut the hell up. September once said she hated her father because he wouldn't hit her mother back. And at community functions, during the big cookouts in the summer, somehow I would always end up behind this woman at the buffet. She was big and obese and she picked at the food with her bare fingers, tasting everything.

           That summer September disappeared I spent a lot of nights lying in bed, wide awake, listening to the angry voices make their way into the street. Sometimes I would sit and watch my ceiling fan turn and turn trying not to listen. Other times I would sit at my bedroom window, both, watching and listening. After a good thirty minutes of the fighting, the yelling, typically, September's father would walk out the door with a beer in his hand. He would jump in his wife’s car, an old Ford Taurus with one winking headlight, and pull out of the driveway.

           Most of the time that's how it ended. I say most of the time, because one of these nights, just as the yelling had calmed and I was on the verge of sleep, there came a random knock at the door. It was September’s mother, bloody and beaten. She was pale, panting, telling a story of a mountain lion, a big golden cat, she called it; she claimed it attacked her, chased her out of her front yard and onto our porch. I remember my father looking at the curved, scimitar-like scratches on her face and then the older bruises on the back of her arm. He sat at our kitchen table with her, cleaned the scratches with a warm wet cloth. He told her she could stay the night, told her to get away from the man who did this to her. And then he walked her back to her door. 

           Because of the mountain lion other parents had decided to keep their children in the house. The local paper ran a headline that read Mountain Lion Spotted in Appleton; above was a picture of September's mother without any explanatory caption below it. The article went on to say that the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife in Maine had three reports before this one, putting the cougars somewhere in the proximal area of Lexington Flats and east Kingfield, a box of land that sat at the edge of Appleton Estates, our neighborhood. My father scoffed at the paper as soon as he opened it. He was convinced this was a hoax, that this was but cover-up for a dysfunctional household. But at night, when I would shut my own eyes to sleep, I remember having trouble not imagining the mountain lion's wet black nose – its growl vibrating deep in its own throat – its breath hot – its whiskers stiff – its marble eyes soft, dark, and deep.

           All of the houses with large summer sundecks saw red-brown sun-kissed mothers and daughters crowd into tanning beds. Gardens grew thick and green and then brown, the vines climbing up and over the boulder walls then dying there in the sun. Luxurious backyards were abandoned, pink algae lining beautiful white fountains and swimming pools. Appleton Estates was forsaken and empty. Of course, my father dismissed the rumors, told me to go out and play, and so did September's parents, who after the incident never mentioned it. Most everyone else took the newspaper article as a warning. They stayed inside. And that summer I walked through their yards like they were my own, hopped their fences, made my own cut-throughs, imagined how I would escape the big golden cat if it were chasing me. I did this until one day, out of the corner of eye, in a downhill stretch of steep ridges that ran along the back of the neighborhood, where the nice wooden fences on my neighbors' land were replaced with the barbed-wired ones that marked the property line, I spotted what I thought to be a tawny animal with a golden coat and long club-like tail, a cougar-gait; it leapt from a plunging incline over old man Seeber's wooden fence.

           Instead of running away from the creature, I followed. I saw a paw disappear into the tree line, like it was sucked into the forest behind the Carrington's house. I lengthened my stride. What began as a jog became a run and that run was broken up by sharp turns and quick leaps over fences small enough to hurdle. It was the first time all summer I had the chance to really break loose, to run, to see how fast my body would move. I felt a sweat break and it felt good and the scenery blurred past all in one streak – the vinyl siding and brick walls and high porches and white stone columns. When I entered the tree line light squeezed through the trees in a weird way; the leaves became the sky and the light parting through looked star-like. There was a hiss and then a snap and I felt something like a burn, then a sting, and I went from an all out sprint to a one leg bounce, landing in a patch of spade shaped weeds. There was something in my shin. It was small and round and it was just under the skin.

           "You were in the way." I did a half turn and I saw nothing. September came out from behind a tree, her rucksack thrown over one shoulder. She was wearing camouflage skateboard shorts and a white rag tied around her head. The rag had KILL THE COUGAR written in black magic marker on it. She was carrying a BB gun, and not just a regular BB gun, a CO2 powered automatic one that appeared to be a knock off of an AK-47.

           "You shot me?" I asked. She came close to me, bent low and put her hand on my hip. A droplet of sweat hung on the end of her nose. "You fucking shot me!" I said.

           "Why are you here?" she asked. She ran her index finger over the tiny lump in my shin.

           I sucked a lot of air in and she patted me on the head. She turned around, began walking out into the woods.

           "Hey, where are you going?" I asked.

           "I was almost sure there were two of them." She stopped, facing out into the forest.

           "Two of them?" I asked.

           "I was almost sure there were two of them..." and this was when she turned around, "and then, after I pulled the trigger to get the second I realized I had shot you."

           "Did you see which way it went?" I asked.

           "C'mon. We need to go this way," she said.

           I used a tree for leverage and got back on my feet. I went limping through the forest, following September, watching her climb over logs and navigate the wooded area.  She surprised me at the way she moved, like she knew exactly where everything was. We crossed a shallow creek bed. Suddenly my toes were cold; water had seeped through a hole in the toe of my shoe. September stopped with a foot still in the water, bent low so that she could put her hand in. A cloud formed in the creek. At the bottom of the bed she had found a print, or so she claimed. After a while she took her hand out of the water and looked up at me.

           "I saw your Dad walk my mother home," she said.

           "You know what you're doing?" I asked. "I mean you're shooting at a mountain lion with a BB gun."

           "Am I?" she asked, looking back over her shoulder. "She deserved it, you know." It was the first time she had ever made complete eye contact with me.

           "Deserved what?" I asked. "He just walked her home."

           She pointed out into a round opening in the trees. "I think she went that way," she said. She walked slowly, cautiously, like the cat might be close. When we came to the other side, there was no mountain lion, no cougar. The forest opened up into a round wide hollow. On the other side of the hollow was Ricky Carrington’s older cousin. He was sitting by a bullseye. He was alone and he looked sad and he was petting a golden retriever. I shuddered at the idea of September shooting his dog. September walked out to the middle of the hollow. She punched the ground with the butt of the gun. The dog beside the kid seemed to slump down when she did it. The kid smoothed the hair on the dog's back, whispered something in its ear.

           "Already went off into the woods," she said, squinting in the sun and looking off into the trees. She put her hand to her forehead to block the sun. "We need to keep going if we want to find it."

           "I think we did find it," I said. I looked at the dog, nodded at the kid.

            "Whatever," she said, marching off, the dry grass crunching under her feet. I was inclined to follow, but something kept me there. I looked at the kid and his dog once more and then watched September disappear into the woods. After that I found my way back over the creek, crossing a small white bridge this time, and when I arrived on solid asphalt, the neighborhood felt safer for some reason. I wasn't sure whether it was because there were likely no cougars inAppleton, or whether September had marched off in the opposite direction. People were out and about in the neighborhood. I passed the Mendez house and saw some kids jumping on a trampoline; a house over, there was another group taking turns throwing flat miniature basketballs at one another. I cut through old man Seeber’s yard to find him drinking scotch on his patio, talking to himself. I had never seen a golden retriever jump a fence as tall as Mr. Seeber's. And I was having a hard time trying to reconcile what September had said – her mother deserved it – with her hunt for the mountain lion.

           I arrived home just as the sun was going down and everything was blue-orange. It was going to be a cool summer night. I could tell. There was a breeze. It smelled faintly like rain but the clouds had passed and everything was open and exposed; dew formed on the grass. I walked in the house, dirty. My father asked where I'd been. I told him hunting for mountain lions. He laughed and changed the channel on the television.

           I sat in my room for a long time, trying to squeeze the BB out of my leg. I walked to my bedroom window and opened it. The air was thick and cool. The whole neighborhood looked light blue. When I closed my eyes I could still picture the mountain lion, the wet nose, the whiskers, everything. And that's when I heard arguing from across the street. The voices bounced between houses. Then I heard September's name. I looked out the window, but I didn't see her. I saw September's father running around his front yard, barefoot and shirtless, his bare chest white in the darkness. He knocked on his own door. He shook his fist at the windows of his house from his driveway. Apparently he had gone outside, and his wife had locked him out, left him there to watch every light in the house go dark.

           He began lurching around the front yard, strangely, slumped low to the ground, mouthing words to himself. It wasn’t long until he found what he was looking for. He held a rock in his hand, stared at it for a while, examining it, looking at the top and bottom, brushing off excess dirt. Seconds later it busted through the windshield of his wife's Ford Taurus. The alarm sounded. The thick glass caved, spider-webbed to the outer edges from a deep hole in its center. Tiny light blue crystals pebbled in the driveway. A light came on in one of the bedrooms and then another at the window for the stairs and then another in the living room. And when September's fat mother came hauling out the front door with no bra, dressed in nothing but a t-shirt, September’s father was already back-pedaling.

           He kept the car between them. When she moved left, he moved right. When she moved right, he moved left. He ducked and she lost sight of him and he crawled to the other side of the car. She bent over, looked for his feet to see which direction he was moving in. Eventually she got impatient and picked a side and he was forced to outrun her. Circling the car and tailing out into the yard, his naked heel escaped her diving swipe by a couple of feet. After that she was done. She rolled over from her chest to her back, laid there – and began to cry. September's bony father walked over and sat in the wet grass with his wife; he took her hand and held it and they sat there for a long time, their fingers braided together. He helped her up and they walked inside. Later the car chirped and the lights in the house went out one by one, again – the living room, then the stairway, then the bedroom on the left – but just as the last light went out, one came on, the bedroom on the right, September's bedroom.

           I watched as the window opened and a square of light cast itself on the house beside it. A brown rucksack came flying out the window and fell in the grass. Leaping down from almost two stories was September, dressed in her camouflage shorts and her white bandana. Her marble eyes shimmered in the purple night, soft, dark and deep. She walked slowly through the darkness like a cat, softly, as if the pads of her feet weren't even on the ground.