by Melanie Tem
Impatient then, propelled by her cousin’s sneering insistence on something she could barely think about, Ruth bounded away from her down the alley. Marguerite did follow. It was Marguerite who cried, with dramatic concern in her old woman’s voice, “Oh, Mary!”
Someone was standing beside the impaled animal. Ruth saw that it was a young man. His long black hair was tied back with a red bandanna. His face was dusky. He was holding up Mary’s haunches, her oval hairless rump, her thick plumed tail now bedraggled with blood and excrement.
The man was calling sporadically for help. The flat rhythm suggested that he didn’t expect anyone to respond, that he thought he’d probably be standing in this alley trying to support the weight and reduce the suffering of the huge beast until she died. Between cries, he was muttering to himself, but Ruth couldn’t hear what he said.
Now he saw them and called to them. “Hey, can you help me out here?”
Marguerite cried, “Oh, you found her! Oh, thank God!” and rushed past Ruth toward the man and the beast.
“This your dog, lady? She’s a beauty. Hurt pretty bad, though. Oughtta take better care of a beautiful animal like this.”
The young man’s eyes darted, surveyed rapidly; Ruth could see their whites flashing. She tried to inventory what he would be taking in: two dotty old ladies, vulnerable but maybe not worth anything to him, stupidly out searching dark alleys before daybreak for their lost pet. An unlikely pet for them to have—he’d have expected a little white yappy poodle named Sparkle or Fluffy, or a dignified cat. Or a canary.
That made Ruth chuckle. Pigeons used to roost under the eaves of the four houses. Flocks of them, hordes of them, filling the curved spaces under the overhangs with their gray and black bodies (which Ruth always thought were pretty but didn’t dare say so), peppering the sidewalks and the courtyard and the walls of the houses with white odorless excrement that Lydia never could scrub off. Cooing; day and night, cooing. Some seasons they were so thick that Mary could open the window of her attic room and grab one at will, and it took many bird generations before, finally, the information became encoded that this was not a safe nesting place. Now there were no pigeons. There were no squirrels in the trees anywhere on the block, either; they had learned faster. But in the autumn field mice moved into the houses, an advance scout first, the temptation of which Mary with varying degrees of difficulty resisted. Eventually, in good years, there would be as many as a hundred of them, and Mary’s chasing and pouncing would shake the houses.
“Hey, would you mind helping me out here?”
“Oh, my dear, we’re so grateful that you’ve found her! You’re so very kind! She escapes from the yard all the time!” Marguerite was obviously enjoying this. Ruth was disoriented, and speechless. “Bad dog!” Marguerite exclaimed.
“She’s hurt,” he said again, accusingly.
Mary’s hind legs hung across his shoulder, tangled in his thin black hair. Her claws hooked dangerously close to his neck. Marguerite was almost to him by now, walking much more slowly and more bent over than she needed to. He didn’t seem at all aware of the danger he was in.
Ruth wondered suddenly: Were males ever aware of their own danger until it was too late? When had her father known?
“We gotta get her down from here before she bleeds to death. She’s already lost a shitload of blood. You go call animal control or the cops or a vet or something, I don’t know. I’ll stay here with her. But hurry the fuck up. She’s heavy.”
His tone was more than a little condescending. Irritated, Ruth wanted to show him something of what he was dealing with here. But her cousin growled a soft warning, then said tremulously to him, “Oh, my dear, we live blocks and blocks away. Oh, she’s such a bad dog! She ran far!” Then she even, to Ruth’s utter amazement and embarrassment, addressed the gigantic beast hanging on the fence. “You’re a bad girl, Mary! Bad girl!”
Mary squirmed. The boy dodged her swinging claws, was knocked slightly off balance by the abrupt shift of her considerable weight against him. He swore. Mary yelped as the fencepost gouged a wider wound, several sharp staccato syllables of pain and fury that, surely, would wake up the whole neighborhood. Ruth looked nervously around. A pickup was turning out of the other end of the alley, but it was heading away from them.
“Maybe,” Marguerite ventured breathlessly, “Ruthie and I could help you lift her down.”
He snorted. “She’s heavy. We’d have to lift her up high enough to clear the post. She’s hurt, so she’s dangerous. I don’t think—”
“Let’s try, though, shall we, dear? Ruthie, you go on the other side.”
Ruth went obediently into the strangers’ backyard, wincing at the creaking and clanging of the gate. She could have simply leapt the fence. A light in the upstairs of the house gave her pause, but she told herself it was probably a bathroom or hallway light left on all night.
She went to the wolf’s great expressive head. Seeing her mother helpless and needing her like this made her so profoundly uncomfortable that she actually considered not doing it, thought about running away. But, of course, she went to her. The enormous shoulder muscles were tightening and lengthening to no avail, the lolling tongue dry now but the chest fur matted where saliva and blood had caked. Her mother’s jaws snapped randomly as she came close. Her mother’s glazed yellow eyes seemed to be following her motion.
“Mary,” she said softly, not daring to say,
What would she call her father if she found him like this—weakened from loss of blood and, of course, not recognizing her? She had never called him anything; would she call him “Pa”?
A ridiculous thing to be thinking. It worried Ruth that such thoughts surfaced at times like this, when she most needed to concentrate on what was expected of her. The older she got the less controlled her thoughts became, and the more she thought of her father, missed her father, which was ridiculous because her father had been dead before she’d ever known him at all.
“Christ, I’ve got her blood and shit all over me,” the young man observed, laughing a little and looking down at himself. “And my own blood, too, where she got me with her claws. Nowhere to take a bath, either. I’m homeless, you know.” It was obviously a word he was using to describe himself for their benefit, because he said it with an odd inflection as if it were a foreign word.
Marguerite was chattering and exclaiming very much like an old woman upset about her injured canine companion. She nodded haphazardly. She clasped her hands at her breast with the little fingers carefully curled under. She rolled her one eye and made her voice squeaky and breathless. Somehow, she stooped, accentuating the hump on her back. “Oh, my!” she said, and, “Oh, dear!”
Obviously highly skeptical, the young man nonetheless took charge of the rescue plan. “You get in the middle, ma’am, and on the count of three we’ll all lift at once.”
Marguerite and Ruth glanced at each other, placed their forearms under Mary’s body, and lifted. Without much physical effort—although Ruth had to concentrate fiercely to keep her mind on what they were doing—they raised the animal up and off the fencepost before the boy even had himself positioned. Blood spurted from the unplugged puncture, and Mary growled.
To the young man’s surprised double take, Marguerite explained sweetly, “Adrenaline, don’t you know. She’s ours, and we love her.”
“Jesus,” he breathed.
Marguerite grinned. From where Ruth stood, her fangs showed.
A car went by. Ruth heard a snatch of traffic report from its radio, which seemed very loud. She heard voices and knew their strange contingent had been observed and commented upon. “Let’s get her home,” she said urgently to her cousin.
“I’ll help you ladies.” When the young man took a step toward them, Ruth smelled his intent. He meant them some kind of harm.
“No,” she said.
But Marguerite said over her, “Why, thank you, dear. We’d appreciate that, wouldn’t we, Ruthie? And in exchange for y
our kindness we will provide you with breakfast and a hot bath.”
Ruth understood Marguerite’s intention then, too, and dimly admired it. But she was tired and uneasy. She did not want this male stranger in her house, no matter how briefly he would be there alive, no matter what useful purposes he could be put to.
Men were never in the house very long alive. Had her father ever lived there?
She knew it wasn’t possible that he had, because he’d been her mother’s consort only long enough for her to be sure she was pregnant. But over the years Ruth had come upon things that must have been his, and whose presence in her mother’s house she couldn’t explain. A crisp white handkerchief with the letter R embroidered in one corner. A sepia-tinted postcard of the Vatican with no message or address except the salutation “Dear Ralph,” as though someone had decided at the last minute not to sent it to him.
Ruth hadn’t gathered up these objects, didn’t think she’d moved them at all, but when she’d gone back recently to look at them again they weren’t there. Maybe her mother had destroyed them. Maybe she herself had put them somewhere and forgotten where.
Since then, the handkerchief and the postcard had acquired a sort of mythical quality in her mind, and sometimes she couldn’t be sure she’d actually seen them, actually turned them over in her hands, actually held them to her nose to sniff the clean-cotton fragrance of the handkerchief and the faint oily odor of the card. There were times when she vividly remembered the colors and textures, the shapes, the odors, but disembodied and without referent; she was not quite remembering the objects themselves.
The three of them carried Mary home through a labyrinth of early-morning alleys. Ruth wouldn’t have been able to find the way herself, but Marguerite managed to keep them off streets altogether. Even so, many cars were pulling out of garages at this time of day, and Ruth was sure all the drivers noticed them and would be telling stories about them at work or that night over the dinner table.
Somewhat vaguely, Ruth looked for her daughter’s car to come along the alley or the street. It must be about time for Lydia to be leaving for work. She was probably running late, hurrying so much that she would lose her keys or forget to lock the door or leave some important ingredient out of the meal she prepared this morning so that when she served it to them for dinner it would be virtually inedible, shaming Ruth once again.
As always, thinking about her daughter embarrassed and annoyed Ruth. She’d never understood what Lydia was doing in this family. From the moment she was born there’d been something weak and nervous about her. Instead of the lusty shrieking characteristic of the girls born generation after generation to the family—and, of course, to Marguerite—Lydia’s cry had been a hesitant mewl, much more a plea than a demand, and it had stopped the instant anyone approached her to snarl at her or to give her what they thought she wanted. Either kind of attention —positive or negative, reward or punishment—produced the same response: Lydia shut up and watched for whatever was expected of her next.
The family’s various trials and rituals—intended to clarify and symbolize, and effective for everyone else—never had been of much use to Lydia. The herbs made her dizzy and confused, but produced no visions or insights and certainly no heightened senses. The unguent caused a rash, barely visible to anyone else but itchy enough that she could not stop fidgeting. And there never had been even the hint of a transformation.
Ruth knew why. Lydia went through the prescribed motions with brittle caution, afraid of making a mistake. She uttered the old and new words very quietly and half a beat slow, so that she could hear the pronunciations and inflections of the others before she would venture her own. Eyes squinting anxiously, she measured the thickness of the unguent on her own flesh against its thickness on the flesh of the others, and she did not put the herbs on her tongue until she’d observed the others do it.
Lydia had never claimed any of it, and had never given herself up to be claimed. Her participation in everything, wolf or human, was tentative and partial. So when she’d eloped with Jake and stayed away all those years, Ruth, though publicly furious and ashamed, had also been proud.
It hadn’t lasted, of course, and now just thinking about her daughter made Ruth vastly irritated. Sometimes she couldn’t remember all the specific reasons she was so irritated with Lydia. Sometimes, to her intense discomfort, she was not even sure who Lydia was to her.
As if reading her mind, Marguerite murmured, “The city corrupts. Weakens.”
“It can strengthen, too,” Ruth said guardedly. “It has strengthened my mother.”
Marguerite guffawed, jostling the hurt beast so that she yelped in their arms. “Not so you’d notice.”
“It has,” Ruth insisted. “You’ll see.”
“How long has it been since you’ve been to the mountains for more than a family get-together?”
Ruth had almost no idea of the passage of time anymore. Yesterday seemed as long ago as her childhood, tomorrow as far away as the end of her life. “I don’t know. A long time, I guess.”
“You should come. For a long visit. There are—things it’s time you saw.” Marguerite seemed to be looking at her pointedly over Mary’s limp, shaggy body.
“Well, I’ve lived in this city my whole life,” the young man told them, bragging. “Lived in this neighborhood my whole life. My old man still lives over there on 38th and Thurman, you know those big places by the lake? More money than he knows what to do with, and I’m his only kid, and can you believe I’m homeless?”
“And what about your mother, dear?” Marguerite, for some reason, wanted to know.
“Gone. Off somewhere. I don’t know. This one’s his fifth wife. Little ho’ younger than me.”
Marguerite tsked and nodded. Ruth, finding it hard to follow anything he said, was acutely aware of the smell of threat that oozed out of him like spoor. Impotent threat, of course, evil intent forever unconsummated, but still unsettling because it would require attention.
“This your house?” he demanded incredulously when they turned in at the gate off 33rd Avenue. He was panting and staggering a little under less than his share of Mary’s weight. Ruth wondered nervously whether he saw how steady the two old women were. “No shit?”
“The four houses on this block are ours, dear,”
Marguerite told him placidly. Why was she volunteering information? Ruth frowned.
“No shit? I been wondering all my life who lived in these fine old houses. Never saw nobody come or go. Cool houses. Must cost a mint.”
“Our family has lived here for generations,” Ruth said primly. “They are debt-free.”
“Old money,” he said, nodding as if he understood something.
Ruth stopped the little procession long enough to bolt the gate. Her mother’s head lolled obscenely on her shoulder where she propped it to free both her hands. The top bolt was considerably higher than her head, and with the extra weight, she could just barely reach it. The boy was paying close attention to the way the bolts were fastened.
They carried Mary across the courtyard. “Hey!” the boy kept saying. “This is cool!”
The gardens were bedraggled, weedy and dry. Lydia hadn’t been taking care of them. Ruth found herself embarrassed. She wondered whether the young man could identify belladonna, henbane, sage, and whether he’d know anything about their properties.
Suddenly she wondered, too, if he could tell where she’d buried her son’s fingers and eyes. If Marguerite could tell. If Mary could.
They moved swiftly through the long back room. To Ruth it smelled strongly of family and of home. She saw the boy make a face, and wished Lydia would clean it better.
They went up the narrow and steep back stairs, built like a servants’ staircase leading directly from the kitchen to the smallest of the second-floor bedrooms, although, of course, this family had never had servants. Marguerite, naturally, had no trouble matching the rapid pace Ruth set, even seemed to be expressionlessly laughing at h
er, but the young man cursed and stumbled. Because of his weakness, the barely conscious Mary several times nearly slid down the incline on top of him.
They carried her all the way up to her room in the attic at the very top of the house. The attic was cluttered with a century of things—visible objects like rolls of carpet, stacks of magazines, broken chairs; hidden things that Ruth only half knew were there, sensed as if they were live creatures. Fleetingly, she thought her father’s memorabilia had been up here, and remembered another one: a silver chain with a big silver cross on it, and, at the intersection of the arms of the cross, a radiant star sapphire.
Then she forgot all that again, because the boy exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, there must be all kinds of shit up here!” and Marguerite answered, “Yes, dear, I believe you’re right,” and Ruth realized her cousin had never been up in the attic before. Suddenly she felt vulnerable to both of them, and her branch of the family exposed. Marguerite was, of course, the far greater danger.
Mary’s room was under the eaves at the west end of the house. From the three tall, curved windows you could always see the mountains, clear day or hazy. When they went in to the small dark room, the young man gagged, and Ruth noticed how rank the odor was.
In the room was a huge ancient brass bed with a tattered, still elegant, wine-colored fringed spread and lacy canopy. But now they laid Mary on the mat on the dusty floor. The young man grunted as he squatted and let go of her, grunted as he straightened again.
Ruth could not bear him alive in the house a moment longer than they needed him. They didn’t need him anymore. She put herself between him and the door, ready. He turned, and she saw the glint of a weapon in his hand, the glint of attack in his eyes.
But through the gloom of Mary’s room, in which the three curved and graduated windows were discrete glaring holes framing the now bright western sky and didn’t spread much light past their edges at all, Marguerite winked at her. Unsure what this signal meant, Ruth hesitated, and Marguerite said to the boy, as though she hadn’t seen the weapon or the look in his eye, “We thank you so much, dear, for helping us to bring our beloved companion safely home. We shall be eternally grateful.”
