The Loop

by Nicholas Evans

  By the time the boy was born, Lovelace had virtually eliminated Hope’s wolves. The ranchers kept him on a retainer to clear up the occasional disperser and any other lesser varmints they were bothered by. His reputation had spread, however, and he had offers of work from far afield, wherever wolves persisted. Almost as soon as J.J. could walk, Joshua took him on his travels and taught him about killing.

  The boy was an eager pupil and was soon adding refinements of his own to his father’s techniques. He inherited a hatred for poison. For the next seventeen years, the two of them spent half the year in Hope and the other half traveling the continent, from Alaska to Minnesota, Alberta to Mexico, going wherever there was a wolf that no one else could catch.

  From the mid-fifties onward, when the traveling became too much for his father, J.J. worked on alone and, of necessity, once wolves were protected by law, in ever greater secrecy.

  The site of the old wolfers’ camp in Hope remained so toxic that for many years the County fenced it off. The road of skulls crumbled and succumbed beneath a tangle of bushes whose berries mothers of successive generations forbade their children to pick.

  Then, long after the last howl of the last wolf had echoed in lament across the valley, bulldozers came to level the land for a park. While the work went on, several dogs died mysteriously from bones they brought home.

  But only Hope’s oldest guessed why.

  Indian folklore had it that the spirits of all America’s slaughtered wolves lived on. They were gathered, so the legend said, on some far-off mountain, beyond the white man’s reach.

  Awaiting a time when they might safely walk again upon the earth.

  9

  Luke Calder leaned back in his chair and waited while his speech therapist rewound the videotape. She had just taped him reading a whole page of This Boy’s Life and he had managed it with only one block, and although it was a big one, he felt pleased with himself.

  Through the window he watched a double trailer-load of cattle that stood shuddering at a red light, a row of pink noses poking wetly through the slatted sides. It was only a little after nine in the morning but already the streets of Helena were shimmering in the heat. On the way in, he’d heard the radio weatherman promising rain. Barely a drop had fallen all summer. The traffic lights went green and the cattle truck rumbled off.

  ‘Okay, kiddo, let’s have a look.’

  Joan Wilson had been helping him with his stutter for about two years now. Luke felt easy with her. She was a tall, genial woman, maybe a few years older than his mother, with rosy cheeks and eyes that disappeared behind them when she smiled. She seemed to have an endless supply of exotic earrings, which Luke thought was odd because otherwise she dressed like a Sunday school teacher.

  Joan worked for a cooperative that covered some of the more remote schools in the area. Luke had always looked forward to her weekly visits. At the start he’d had joint sessions with a younger boy, called Kevin Leidecker, which Luke had found hard because the boy’s stutter was nowhere near as bad as his own.

  He’d liked Leidecker well enough, until he overheard him in the locker room one day doing an imitation of ‘Cookie’ Calder, blocking on To be or not to be. It was pretty good; had the other kids almost wetting themselves. Luke’s nickname (some preferred ‘Cooks’ or ‘Cuckoo’) came from the stabbing stutter he often got into when asked to say his name.

  A year ago, the Leideckers had moved to Idaho and since then Luke had had Joan to himself. During school vacations, instead of her coming to see him, he came to see her and, every Wednesday morning, drove himself to this private clinic.

  They had used the video a few times before, usually to practice some new technique or to help him see what he was doing physically. when he blocked. Today it was because lately, in addition to the tightening he always felt around the mouth, he’d found himself blinking and skewing his neck to the left. Joan said this was quite normal. It was what they called ‘secondary characteristics’. She was videoing him so they could both examine what was going on and see if they could do something about it.

  The first time they used the video, she’d been worried it might upset him to see himself on the screen, but it didn’t. It was like looking at someone else. His voice sounded weird, especially when he came near to a danger word and did that nerdy, smiling thing. Joan always told him how handsome he was, which was nice of her but, of course, just therapist bullshit. To his own eye he looked like a frightened bird, likely at a second’s notice to spread his wings and fly away.

  Screen-Luke was doing pretty well. He was sailing through words that often knocked him flat, M words and P words like music and Paris. He even got through Hohner Marine Band but that was only because everything was easy compared with what was coming.

  He’d already spotted it up ahead and as it got nearer and nearer he knew he wasn’t going to make it. He heard Screen-Luke’s voice begin to brace itself, like the engine of a car straining on a mountain pass. And then, as he came up to the M of Moulin Rouge, he took a great gulp of air and his mouth locked and pushed forward and he started to blink. He’d run smack into the brick wall and for five, six, seven seconds he was stuck there, his face pressed into it.

  ‘I l-look like a fish.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Okay, let’s stop it there.’

  Joan pressed pause and froze Screen-Luke pouting in mid-blink, confirming what he’d just said.

  ‘Look. Fish.’

  ‘You saw the words coming.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Was it something to do with it being in French maybe?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s no b-big deal. I just wish I didn’t b-blink like that.’

  She wound the tape back and played it again, and this time showed him where he was tensing up. You could see the muscles in his face and neck contract. She got him to say the phrase several times over and think about what his tongue and his jaw were doing as he said it. Then she got him to read the whole thing again and this time, although there were a couple of minor blocks and repetitions, he didn’t blink or twist his neck once.

  ‘See?’ Joan said. ‘You were right. No big deal.’

  He shrugged and smiled. They both knew that success here was one thing; doing it in normal life was another. Sometimes he could spend a whole hour talking with Joan and not block at all. Then he’d go home and his father would ask him a simple question and he would completely seize up, even if the answer was yes or no.

  Talking with Joan didn’t count. Just like it didn’t count when he talked with animals. He could talk all day to Moon Eye or the dogs, as if he’d never stuttered in his life. But it didn’t count. Because it wasn’t like the real world where words had such terrifying importance. Apart from Joan, there was only one person in the world he could talk with easily (well, two, if you counted Buck Junior who didn’t yet understand a word, which was probably why it was okay) and that was his mother.

  She was the only one who didn’t look away when he got into trouble. And if he blocked, she just waited patiently and the tension would slip out of him like water from a tub. It had always been like that.

  He could remember her grabbing him up from the supper table and carrying him away to safety when his father was insisting he ask properly for something. Luke would sit there going redder and redder while the wall in front of the word he was trying to say got higher and higher and then he would start crying and his mother would leap up and take him away to another part of the house where they would sit in the dark and listen to his father ranting and raving until the door slammed and his car roared off into the night.

  That was the real world. Where a little word like milk or butter or bread could raise a hurricane that would sweep through the whole house and leave everyone in it sobbing and hollering and quaking with terror.

  After the video work, Joan got him to do some voluntary stuttering, doing it deliberately to get him used to having control over his speech. She said this might help with
the blinking too and he might try practicing it on his own along with his other exercises. The one he’d been working on lately was to make meaningless sounds, get the voice flowing like a river, then just let the words float out on it.

  Then they did some role-playing which was more for fun than anything and normally ended up with them both helpless with laughter. Joan was a frustrated actress and always gave it all she’d got. Last week she’d been the bad-tempered owner of a concession stand at a ball game and Luke had to chat about the game and order some popcorn and two Cokes. He could always make her crack up by throwing something in, like last week, when he’d asked her to marry him. Today she was a mean traffic cop who had just stopped him for speeding. She checked his papers, handed them back and then leaned toward him and sniffed.

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Not much, ma’am.’

  ‘Not much. How much?’

  ‘Just five or six beers.’

  ‘Five or six beers!’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. And a bottle of w-whiskey.’

  Luke could see her lips begin to quiver.

  ‘Okay, that’s it. You’re booked.’

  Joan always avoided eye contact when she was about to laugh and now she shook her head and pretended to write something on a notepad beside her on the desk. Then she tore off the sheet and handed it to him. Luke studied it. It was her shopping list.

  ‘Ma’am, I d-don’t understand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve booked me for Po-Pop-Tarts and p-pantyhose.’

  That did it. She started to shake and by the time they’d stopped laughing it was ten o’clock and the session was over. They both stood up and she put an arm around his shoulders.

  ‘You’re doing okay, kiddo. You know that?’

  Luke smiled and nodded and she stood back and gave him a look. Nodding, like all avoidance tricks, was strictly forbidden.

  ‘I’m d-doing okay,’ he said. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She walked him out and along the corridor that led to the lobby.

  ‘How’s your mom?’

  ‘She’s fine. She said to say hi.’

  ‘Are you still planning on putting college off till next year?’

  ‘Uh-huh. My dad thinks it’s a g-good idea.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I g-guess so.’

  She peered at him as if something in his face might show this to be a lie. He smiled.

  ‘I do. Really,’ he said.

  Joan knew about him and his father. They’d talked about it right from the start and though Luke, through some baffling sense of loyalty, had spared her much, she clearly believed his father was largely to blame for his stutter. Luke often got the feeling, however, that her dislike ran deeper and was maybe colored by what had happened with one of her predecessors, a much younger woman than Joan, to whom his father had taken a shine. Her name was Lorna Drewitt and she had been Luke’s speech therapist for about a year before he discovered what was going on.

  It was during the Christmas vacation when Luke was twelve years old. His father had come to collect him from the clinic and told him to wait in the car while he ‘settled up’ with Miss Drewitt. Luke had been sitting in the dark parking lot for ten minutes when a man knocked on the window and said his car was boxed in and could they move theirs to let him out.

  Luke ran back into the clinic to tell his father and didn’t think to knock on Lorna’s door. Like a total jerk he just burst in and, in that splinter of a second before they sprang apart, he caught the two of them pressed together against the filing cabinet and plainly saw his father’s hand up inside her hoisted sweater, cupping her breast.

  Lorna quickly rearranged herself and pretended to be searching for something in the cabinet while Luke stood there, feeling his face begin to glow, and tried to say that there was a man outside who wanted to move his car. But he ran aground on the first M and stayed stranded there like a beached whale until his father came over and said quietly,

  ‘It’s all right, son. I’m coming.’

  They drove all the way back home in silence and no mention was ever made of what his father must have known Luke had seen. That was the last he saw of Lorna Drewitt, though later he heard she had moved to Billings, a town his father still often visited on business.

  Whether Joan knew of this particular incident or of some similar one, Luke wasn’t sure. Perhaps all she knew was his father’s famed womanizing, which Luke later discovered at school was common knowledge. Whatever the reason, Joan took little trouble to hide her feelings and when Luke had first told her he wasn’t going straight to college that fall, she’d gotten all worked up and said that the sooner he got away, the better he and his stutter would be.

  They said goodbye in the clinic lobby and Luke put his hat on and stepped out into the blast of white sun and across the parking lot.

  Driving out of Helena, he mulled over what Joan had said about him needing to get away. She was probably right. He knew full well why his father wanted him to do a year’s work on the ranch before going to college.

  Luke had his heart set on studying wildlife biology at the University of Montana in Missoula, a place his father thought infested with liberals and ‘bunny-huggers’. He wanted Luke to follow Kathy’s example and do agribusiness management at rancher-friendly Montana State in Bozeman and was hoping that a year of practical ranching might make his son see sense.

  Luke was happy enough to go along with it, though for an entirely different reason.

  It meant he could go on watching the wolves. And if the need arose, as he feared it might, perhaps he would be able to protect them.

  There was no one to be seen when he got back to the ranch. His mother’s car was gone and he figured she must be up at Kathy’s or had maybe gone into town. There was another car Luke recognized as belonging to the local vet, Nat Thomas. He parked the old Jeep beside it and got out. Their two Australian cattle dogs came rushing to greet him and bounced beside him as he walked up the dusty slope to the house.

  He called hello when he came through the screen door into the kitchen but there was no reply. His mother had left something cooking in the oven. It smelled good. Everyone would soon be coming in for lunch. Wednesday, after his session with Joan, was now the only day he got to eat with the others. Every other day, since his father had given him the job of riding the herd up on the allotment, he just took sandwiches and ate them on his own. It suited Luke just fine.

  He headed up to his room to change into his work clothes so he could ride out directly after eating.

  His room was upstairs on the southwest corner of the house. From the west-facing window you could see the head of the valley where the forest began and, beyond it, the mountains whose tops were often veiled with cloud.

  It was really two rooms, knocked into one. The other half, through an open archway, had been his brother’s. And though, over the years since the accident, Luke had gradually colonized some of it, Henry was still very much present.

  Some of his clothes still hung in the closet. There were shelves crammed with his high school photographs, sport trophies and his collection of hunting magazines. Hanging from a hook on the bottom shelf was what had once been his most treasured possession: a baseball mitt autographed in faded ink by some superannuated star. Go Henry, it said, Hit ’em big.

  Luke sometimes wondered if his parents had ever discussed clearing it all away. He guessed it must be hard to know what to do with a dead child’s possessions. Hiding them might be as bad as leaving them.

  The shelves in Luke’s half of the room were filled with books and a museum-like clutter of things he had picked up in the mountains. There were rocks of strange color and pattern and shape, gnarls of old wood like the faces of trolls and fossilized fragments of dinosaur bone. There were bear claws and feathers of eagles and owls and the skulls of badger and bobcat.

  There were stacks of books, some of which he read again
and again - Jack London, Cormac McCarthy and Aldo Leopold - and books about animals of almost every kind. Hidden among them, as others might hide raunchy magazines, were the ones about wolves. He had more than a dozen of them, some by old-timers like Stanley P. Young, but mostly those of more modern writers, like Barry Lopez, Rick Bass and the great wolf biologist David Mech.

  Luke looked at his watch. He had about an hour to kill before the others showed up for lunch, so he decided to do some of Joan’s voice exercises. He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes and began what she called the ‘body scan’. Breathing slowly and deeply, he consciously relaxed every muscle in his body. Each time he breathed out, he ‘sounded it’ with a soft moan. Little by little, he felt the tension slacken.

  Then he pictured in his mind, as Joan had told him, that his voice was a river, flowing from his mouth, and that he could let words, any words, whatever nonsense came into his head, gently float upon the river and out into the world.

  ‘Me oh my, how I love cherry pie. Float with the pie, let the pie float by . . .’

  The river flowed out through his open door and along the corridor where particles of dust glittered in a wedge of sun, then on and down, to the listening house below.

  ‘My mom’s cherry pie floated up to the sky.’

  After awhile his voice grew sleepy and slow, as if the river were forming a lake and the water slowly swirling, filling the house until at last he fell asleep and the silence regathered, stirred only by the lowing of a distant calf.

  It was how the house mostly was nowadays: silent and empty of all but memories. It had been that way since Luke’s sisters had moved out, first Lane, who had married a real estate agent from Bozeman, then Kathy.

  You noticed it most of all in the living room, from which all the other downstairs rooms radiated. It was a large room, with a broad-plank cedar floor and walls of swirled white plaster, framed in pine. At its far end stood a stone hearth where, on winter nights, great logs would crackle and roar and still be there glowing at dawn. Above it, a hooded black iron flue towered toward heavy beams, burnished by decades of smoke to the color of molasses.