The Loop

by Nicholas Evans

  In fact, her father wasn’t far wide of the mark. Whether her research was ‘groundbreaking’ was debatable, but it was certainly one of the most intensive studies ever carried out into why some wolves kill livestock and others don’t. It was about the age-old issue of nature versus nurture (which had always intrigued her) and seemed to suggest that cattle-killing was more learned than inherited.

  Helen was damned, however, if she was going to perform a party piece and share any of this with Courtney, who now had her pretty chin propped on one hand, trying to look fascinated.

  ‘Tell me what it was like. I mean, what did you do?’

  Helen emptied her glass before answering, nonchalantly.

  ‘Oh, you kind of follow them around. Follow their tracks, trap them, radio-collar them. Find out what they’re eating.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Basically you examine their shit.’

  A woman at the next table gave her a look. Helen smiled sweetly at her and went on, louder.

  ‘You pick up every piece of shit you find and poke around in it for hairs and bone and stuff and then analyze what it came from. When they’ve just been on a kill, the shit’s all kind of black and runny which makes it more difficult to handle. And really, really smelly, you know? God, that kind of wolf shit, can it stink! It’s better when they haven’t eaten in awhile, you know, the turds are kind of firmer. Easier to pick up. With your fingers.’

  Courtney nodded sagely. To her credit, she hadn’t flinched once. Helen knew her father was giving her his hurt stare and she told herself off for being so childish. She’d had way too much to drink.

  ‘Anyway, that’s enough of that shit,’ she said. ‘Courtney, why don’t you tell me about your shit? You’re a banker right?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Got any money?’

  Courtney smiled, easily. She had class, this girl.

  ‘Only other people’s,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘And you’re a psychologist.’

  ‘Well, I never practiced.’

  ‘Practice makes perfect and you seem pretty damn perfect to me.’

  ‘Helen . . .’ Her father put a hand on her arm.

  ‘What? What?’ Helen looked at him, all innocence.

  He was about to say something, then gave her a sad little smile instead. ‘Who’d like dessert?’

  Courtney said she needed to go to the bathroom, though after how little she’d consumed, Helen couldn’t imagine why, except to touch up her nails maybe. When she had safely gone, Helen’s father said,

  ‘What’s the matter with you, baby?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s no rule that says you have to hate her, you know.’

  ‘Hate her? What on earth do you mean?’

  He sighed and looked away. Helen felt her eyes suddenly fill up with tears. She reached out and put a hand on her father’s arm.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  He took her hand in both of his and looked, with great concern, right into her eyes.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said.

  She sniffed and fought back the tears. God, she couldn’t make yet another scene in this place, they’d have her committed.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I worry about you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine.’

  ‘Have you heard from Joel?’

  She had prayed he wouldn’t ask. Now she was sure to cry. She nodded, not trusting her voice for a moment, and took a deep breath.

  ‘Yep. He wrote me.’

  No, she wasn’t going to cry. Joel was thousands of miles away and it was all over, anyway. And here came dear old Courtney, heading out toward them through the restaurant, smiling with new resolve and freshly glossed lips. Helen resolved to give her a break. She wasn’t so bad. In fact there was something tough and sassy about her that Helen found appealing.

  Who knows, she thought, someday they might even be friends.

  6

  Helen flew back to Boston that same evening. She had planned to stay the weekend with friends in New York but she called them from the airport and made some excuse about having to get home. In truth, she simply wanted to get out of the stifle and clamor of Manhattan.

  The rest of the lunch had been better. Her father gave her a beautiful Italian leather purse that Courtney had helped him choose. Courtney had a present for her too, a bottle of perfume, and redeemed herself vastly in Helen’s estimation by eating a giant slice of chocolate gateau.

  To her father’s obvious pleasure, the two women had even kissed goodbye, with Helen undertaking to be in Barbados for the wedding, though refusing flatly to be a bridesmaid. Not even Matron of Dishonor, she said.

  It was getting on for ten o’clock by the time she’d driven down from Boston and swung east onto Route 6, which would take her all the way up the Cape to Wellfleet.

  In her haste to get out of New York, she had forgotten it was a Friday night, when the going was always slowest. Most of the way it was bumper to bumper with weekenders and tourists, their car roofs stacked high with bicycles, boats and boogie boards. Helen longed for the fall when the place would empty out and even more for winter when the wind roared across the bay and you could walk the ocean shore for mile upon mile and the only living things you saw were birds.

  The house she had lived in for the last two years was a rental on the bay side, a mile or so south of Wellfleet village. She still thought of it as Joel’s house. To reach it you had to leave the highway and negotiate a labyrinth of narrow, wooded lanes, then a steep dirt trail that led down to the water.

  Driving through the woods, away from the traffic at last, Helen turned off the air-conditioning of the ancient Volvo station wagon and wound down the window to get the warm smell of the woods. It was probably no cooler than New York, but the heat here was different, the air clean and there was nearly always a breeze.

  The car bumped its way down the trail until she could see the black expanse of water below her through the trees and the three small houses she had to pass before the final descent to her own. She stopped beside her mailbox but there was nothing in it. He hadn’t written for over a month.

  There was a light still on at the Turners’ who looked after Buzz when she was away. She could hear him barking a welcome as she pulled up outside. He was inside the screen door of the kitchen, wagging his tail and watching her. Mrs Turner appeared and let him out.

  Buzz was a neutered scruff of uncertain parentage that Helen had got from a dog pound in Minneapolis, the Christmas before she met Joel. Which, except for her father and an ill-tempered hamster - one of the menagerie of pets Helen had kept as a child - made it the longest relationship with a male she had ever had. His coat was shaggy now, which made nonsense of his name. When she’d first laid eyes on him, he’d had an all-over crew-cut to rid him of a frightful infestation. Covered in blotches of purple disinfectant, he’d been, without even a close rival, the ugliest dog in the pound. Helen simply had to have him.

  ‘Hiya Trouble. How’re you doing? Get down now, get down.’

  Buzz jumped into the car and waited in the passenger seat while Helen thanked Mrs Turner and chatted for a minute or two about the horrors of summer in the city. Then she and Buzz drove down the last quarter of a mile of bumps and potholes to the house.

  It was a big old place, clad in rotting white clapboard that rattled when the wind blew, as it often did, from the west. It stood on its own like a beached liner at the water’s edge, overlooking a marshy inlet of the bay. It seemed yet more like a ship inside, its every wall, floor and ceiling paneled in narrow, darkly varnished tongue and groove. Upstairs, twin gable windows surveyed the bay like portholes. The bridge of the ship was a long bay window in the living room where at high water you could look out and imagine you were at last afloat and setting sail for the Massachusetts mainland.

  Helen could happily stand at that window all day, if she let herself, watching the weather re
arrange the shapes and colors of the bay like a restless, perfectionist painter. She loved the way the wind and clouds made traveling patterns through the marsh grass and how, when the tide slid out, the air filled with a salty, primordial tang and the mud flats hummed and scuttled with armies of fiddler crabs.

  The time-switch light above the back door was on and a welcome-home party of bugs was whirring around it, casting shadows five times their size on the stoop. Helen dumped her bag outside the door She would take a quick walk along the shore to give Buzz a run She was tired, but the kind of tired you get from sitting in a plane and a car too long. It was also an excuse to delay going inside. The house seemed so big and silent now that it was only she and the dog who lived there.

  She walked down the curve of broken boardwalk and then down the steps to the strip of sand that ran beside the marsh grass all the way to the end of the inlet.

  The breeze felt good on her face and she took the salt air deep into her lungs. Across the bay she could see the lights of some small boat heading out on the tide. A waning moon was looking for gaps among the clouds, and when it found one, lit a path across the water. Buzz ran ahead, stopping now and then to pee or sniff the line of fresh debris that the tide had left.

  When Joel was around, they had taken this walk every night before turning in. And early on, in the days when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other for five minutes, they would stop and find a hollow in the dunes and make love, while Buzz went off on his own, foraging for crabs in the marsh grass or chasing birds he’d sprung, then coming back sodden and making them shriek by shaking himself all over them.

  About half a mile along the shore was the hull of an old yawl that someone had once perhaps intended to rebuild but that had now rotted beyond salvation. It had been hauled onto the shingle above the reach of all but the highest tides and lay tethered uselessly by moss-bearded ropes to two old trees. It was like the skeleton of some less ambitious Noah’s ark, abandoned by all but rats, to whom Buzz paid nightly visits. He was in there now, growling and scuffling in the dark. Helen sat on a driftwood log and lit a cigarette.

  She and Buzz had first come to the Cape on vacation in early June the summer before last. Her sister had rented a house for the whole season, one of the million-dollar places set high above the water, with a stunning view over to Great Island and its own steep, wooden staircase down to the beach. She had invited Helen to stay.

  Celia had married her college sweetheart, bright but boring Bryan, whose software company had just been bought out by a California computer giant for a mind-boggling amount of money. Even before that, they had been predictably happy and had produced, with no trouble at all, two perfect, blond children: a boy and a girl, Kyle and Carey. They lived in Boston, in a waterside development that, naturally, had won several design awards.

  Helen had spent most of the previous five years roughing it in the wilds of Minnesota and it took her awhile to get used to the luxury. The ‘guest suite’ at Celia’s Cape Cod rental even had its own jacuzzi. She had planned to stay for a week, then go back to Minneapolis to work on her thesis, for which her supervisor was already nagging. But the week became a fortnight, then the fortnight a month.

  Bryan would drive down each weekend from Boston to join them and once, for a few days, their mother and Ralphie came to stay, managing to break one of the beds. The rest of the time it was just Helen, Celia and the children. They got on well and it was good to have time to get to know the kids, though her sister remained the enigma she always had been.

  Nothing seemed to faze Celia. Not even Buzz eating her best straw hat. Her clothes were always clean and pressed, her figure trim, her hair washed and neatly bobbed. On those rare occasions when Kyle or Carey howled or threw a tantrum, she would just smile and soothe and hug them until they felt better. She did charity work, played elegant tennis and cooked like a dream. She could lay on an impromptu banquet for ten at half an hour’s notice. She never had headaches or sleepless nights or got grouchy with her period and even in the privacy of her own bathroom, Helen surmised, seldom, if ever, broke wind.

  Helen had long ago discovered there was little fun to be had in trying to shock her sister. It was impossible and anyway they were grown-ups now and you didn’t do that to someone who washed your underwear and brought you a cup of coffee in bed every morning. They talked to each other a lot, mainly about nothing, though just occasionally Helen would try to find out what Celia felt about the important things in life, or at least what she herself considered important.

  One night after supper, when Bryan wasn’t there and the kids were in bed, Helen asked her about their parents’ divorce. They were sitting at the table under the trees, finishing the wine which Helen, as usual, had drunk most of, and watching the sun sink beyond the island into the black band of the Massachusetts coast. She wanted to know if the divorce had been as traumatic for Celia as it had been for her.

  Celia shrugged. ‘Oh, I guess I always felt it was for the best.’

  ‘But doesn’t it ever make you angry?’

  ‘No. That’s just the way they were. They wanted to stay together till we were old enough not to be too upset by it.’

  ‘And you weren’t “too upset” by it?’ Helen asked incredulously.

  ‘Oh sure. I was mad at them for awhile. But you can’t let these things get to you. It’s their life after all.’

  Helen had persisted, trying to find some crack in what she thought might only be a protective veneer, but she couldn’t. Maybe it was true that this same event that had torn her own guts apart and sent her, in her love life at least, spiraling almost out of control for years, had left her sister untouched. Whatever, there was no point talking about it. But how strange, she thought, for two people with the same genes to be so different. Perhaps one of them had been swapped at birth.

  After a month of swimming, reading and playing with Kyle and Carey on the beach, Helen had grown restless. A friend of hers in Minneapolis had given her the number of a friend, called Bob, who was working at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, farther down the Cape, and one evening Helen called him.

  He sounded nice and asked her if she would like to come to a supper party he was holding that weekend. He and a few friends were going to be watching some ‘amazing footage’ that one of the Woods Hole guys had shot inside the womb of a sand tiger shark. It wasn’t exactly Helen’s idea of a great night out but what the hell, she thought, why not?

  She noticed Joel Latimer as soon as she walked in.

  He looked like one of those Californian surfbums from the sixties, tall and thin and tanned with a mop of sunbleached blond hair. He caught her staring at him while Bob was telling her about Woods Hole and he gave her such a direct smile she nearly spilled her wine.

  It was a help-yourself-in-the-kitchen kind of dinner and Helen found herself at the vegetarian lasagne alongside him.

  ‘So you’re the woman who runs with the wolves,’ he said.

  ‘Actually it’s more of a flat-footed shuffle.’

  He laughed. He had the bluest eyes and the whitest teeth she’d ever seen. She felt something contract in her stomach and told herself not to be ridiculous. He wasn’t even her type, though quite what was her type she’d never been quite sure. He helped her to some salad.

  ‘You’re on vacation here?’

  ‘Yes, I’m staying with my sister. Up at Wellfleet.’

  ‘Then we’re neighbors.’

  Joel was from North Carolina and she could hear it in his accent. His father ran a fishing business. He told her he was doing a PhD on horseshoe crabs, which he said weren’t really crabs at all, but arachnids, distant cousins of the spider. They were a kind of living fossil, ancient even when dinosaurs roamed the earth; they had been around for about four hundred million years without changing.

  ‘Sounds like my supervisor,’ she said. He laughed. God, she felt witty. Normally in the presence of good-looking men she either lost the power of speech or babbled like
a loon. She asked him what the crabs looked like.

  ‘You know those helmets the Nazis wore? Well, they’re like that, only brown. And inside it’s kind of like a scorpion.’

  ‘Definitely like my supervisor.’

  ‘And it has this spiked tail sticking out the back.’

  ‘He keeps his tucked away.’

  He told her that horseshoe blood had all kinds of important medical applications, was even used to diagnose and treat cancer. But they were a species under pressure and one of the problems here on the Cape was that eel fishermen killed them for bait. His research was to find out how serious an impact this was having on the local horseshoe populations. He lived in a big old rented place, just south of Wellfleet. It looked like a ship, he said. She must come by and visit.

  They took their food off to a corner and he told her who the other guests were and about the video they were going to see. She asked him how you got to shoot a movie inside the womb of a shark.

  ‘With great difficulty.’

  ‘I guess you have to find a really big shark—’

  ‘Or a really small cameraman.’

  ‘Right. Who’s also a gynecologist.’

  Later, watching it, sitting crammed on the couch between Joel and someone else, she wondered if he was as aware of the press of their bodies as she was. His jeans were torn and she couldn’t stop herself sneaking looks at the patch of tanned thigh that showed through.

  The guy who’d shot the video (who was of normal size) talked them through it, explaining that when a female sand tiger has mated, several fertilized egg capsules form in two separate wombs, developing rapidly into embryo sharks complete with teeth. In each womb, one shark fetus emerges as the strongest and then sets about murdering and devouring its brothers and sisters. Only these two are born, already well versed in the art of killing.

  As he talked, the tiny endoscope camera traveled the glutinous pink caves and tunnels of the mother shark, like a Steadicam in a cheap horror movie. You could see a swilling soup of dead baby sharks but no sign of the infant from hell who’d killed them all. Then, at the far end of the womb, a yellow eye suddenly surfaced in the soup, looking right at the camera and a room full of case-hardened biologists screamed in unison. In the laughter that followed, Helen was embarrassed to find she had grabbed hold of Joel’s arm. She quickly let it go.