Songs of Love and Darkness

by Mary Jo Putney

  His Wolf

  The wolf was standing on the grass behind the library. It wasn’t one of those big, powerful, northern timber wolves you see in the movies, but the much smaller, leaner, actually kind of scrawny-looking gray wolf that was long ago native to Texas.

  At least, I’d thought they were extinct … but then I remembered stories the students told about panthers, bears, and other dangerous animals that had survived in patches of woodland they called the Big Thicket, and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I just knew this was a wild animal, nobody’s pet.

  And yet I wasn’t afraid. Instinct might have made my heart beat faster and charged my muscles, but I didn’t want to flee or fight: I was purely thrilled by this strange meeting, feeling as if I’d been allowed to walk into a different world.

  I took a step.

  “Lobo! Here!” A man’s voice rang out, sharp as a whip crack, and the animal turned away. My heart dropped, and then I was annoyed. Of course somebody owned this animal. Some stupid, posturing fool.

  Hitching my heavy book bag up my shoulder, I folded my arms across my chest and checked him out.

  I’ve heard it said that people resemble their pets, and there was something a little lupine about him—maybe it was his lean, rangy body, or the way he stood, as if ready to take off running, or leap to the attack. He wore a plain gray T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes, but nothing else about him looked either casual or modern. His dark face had a keen, hungry edge, emphasized by the narrow blade of his nose. His age I guessed to be near my own, in that shadow line between youth and age. He certainly wasn’t a student, and I didn’t recognize him as a member of the faculty or the support staff. I’d never seen him before, and he didn’t look like he belonged. He was as out of place here as the wolf.

  Speaking quietly, he said, “He won’t hurt you.”

  “Do I look scared?” I snapped. “And what do you mean by calling a Mexican wolf ‘Lobo’? Doesn’t he deserve his own name?”

  He smiled without showing his teeth. “What makes you think he’s a Mexican wolf?”

  “Because there haven’t been wolves in Texas for a long time—unless they wandered across the border.”

  “We’re a long way from the border here, ma’am.”

  Of course we were. And the wolf hadn’t exactly walked here by himself. I realized that I was still clinging to my fantasy of a wild creature, and embarrassment made me lash out.

  “Yes, of course, you could have bought him anywhere—Houston, New Orleans? These hybrids are popular because some people think they’re too special to just buy a dog. Gotta take a walk on the wild side. What’d they tell you, he’s ninety-eight percent purebred canis lupus? So you call him ‘wolf,’ like that’ll make it true.”

  “I didn’t buy him. I don’t know what anybody says he is, and I don’t care. Why shouldn’t I call him Lobo?”

  “It’s … insulting. Imagine if people called you hombre.”

  The tight smile again. “They call me wolf-man.”

  I’d heard that name before, from snatches of overheard student conversation, but didn’t know its significance, so I shrugged. “Maybe, but you have your own name. Doesn’t Lobo deserve as much?”

  The wolf gave a small groan, and I saw that he was quivering as if longing to break free.

  The man laughed, a short bark, and gave me a measuring look. “What’ve you got in that bag, barbecue?”

  I frowned. “Books. Why?”

  “I’m trying to figure what’s the big attraction.”

  “Maybe he senses that I care. Why don’t you let him come?”

  For a second, I thought that he would refuse, but he snapped, “Go free.”

  Immediately, the wolf sprang at me. I kept still, not from fear, but simply careful, as I would be with any strange dog, not to alarm him with any sudden moves. And he was equally careful, sniffing at me gently, almost daintily, before moving closer, inviting me to stroke his head.

  “He’s very friendly,” I said.

  “No he’s not.” At my look, he went on. “I don’t mean he’s aggressive—he’d never attack a human being, and only fights dogs if he’s forced to defend himself. But he’s always kept his distance, from everyone—everyone but me.”

  Lobo had relaxed. Now he was leaning into me as I scratched behind his ears; he was loving it. I laughed. “You’re kidding. Look at this big baby! He’s starving for attention.”

  “He gets plenty. I know you think I’m some kind of stupid bad-ass hick, but I do look after him.”

  The real hurt in his words took me aback. “Of course! It’s obvious you care about each other.” As I spoke, I looked up, straight into the man’s eyes. They were brown, mostly dark, but flecked with a lighter color—the flashing gold of the wolf’s eye—and I was suddenly breathless in the unexpected intimacy of his gaze. I didn’t even know his name. Gathering my wits, remembering my manners, I put out my hand. “How do you do? I’m Katherine Hills.”

  The barest flicker of hesitation, then he gripped my hand. “Cody. Cody Vela. Listen, I can’t hang around. I—Lobo’s waiting for his afternoon run.”

  The wolf’s ears pricked.

  “Oh, well, sure. It was nice meeting you,” I said, feeling flat.

  “Want to come along?”

  My heart leaped like a crazy thing, but I grimaced and gestured at my long cotton skirt and sandals. “I’m hardly dressed for running, even supposing I could keep up with you two.”

  “Come along for the ride. I’m going into the Thicket. Ever been there? No? Really?” He sounded astonished. “Then you have to.”

  I rarely acted on impulse, and hadn’t gone off with anyone “for the ride” since I was fifteen, but I agreed, and followed after the lean, dark man and the lightly stepping wolf as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do.

  His car, a big, black, new-looking SUV, was parked a short distance away, on the street. It wasn’t a spot convenient to anywhere, hidden away behind the blank, limestone back wall of the library, and since the visitor parking lot was never crowded on a weekday afternoon, I wondered what had brought him here.

  “Do you work on campus?” I asked as I buckled up.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you employed by the college?”

  He laughed sharply. “Oh, definitely not!”

  “Related to one of the students?”

  Shaking his head, he started the engine and pulled away from the curb. “Are you saying you’ve never heard of the wolf-man?”

  “I only moved here in August. So I haven’t had time to learn about all the local characters, or go into the woods.”

  “Tsk-tsk. What have you been doing with your time?”

  “Planning my classes, teaching …”

  “What department?”

  “English.”

  “You like books.”

  There was an understatement! Literature was the great passion of my life. I murmured a restrained agreement, and gazed out the window as we left the quiet, shady college grounds, expecting he’d change the subject.

  “What’s your favorite book?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly name just one.”

  “Favorite author?”

  That was easier. “Virginia Woolf.”

  “Of course.” He turned his head, and I met his gaze quickly, nervously, before he returned to watching where he was going, smiling to himself.

  “What do you mean, ‘of course’?”

  “I knew you reminded me of somebody. That long, graceful neck, beautiful, deep eyes, full lips …”

  I felt a warm flush of pleasure at his admiring words.

  “People must have told you that before? Don’t they call you the Woolf-woman?” He grinned. “That should be your nickname on campus, around the English department, at least.”

  “I don’t have a nickname. Not that I’ve ever heard.” Nobody here was interested enough to give me a special name, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. That he knew
something about Virginia Woolf intrigued me. “So who’s your favorite author?”

  “Dostoyevsky. Although I like Stephen King a lot. And James Lee Burke. There, I’ve surprised you. You probably thought I dropped out of high school—well, I did, but that doesn’t mean I don’t read. I like reading. Good books, that is.”

  We passed the city limits sign, and he picked up speed.

  “City limits”—it struck me as a sick joke to apply the name of city to a town with a population that only brushed six thousand when college was in session. Almost every day I asked myself what I was doing here.

  “So what brought you to this neck of the woods?”

  “I needed a job; the college needed an English teacher. It was all kind of last-minute; we’d both been let down.” I didn’t feel like going into detail.

  “You’re not from the South.”

  “Chicago.”

  “Wow. I’ve never been there. It must be different.” He went on to ask questions that were easy for me to answer without touching on anything too personal. As I talked about weather and food and Oprah, he took the highway heading south, driving past the turn-off to the poky little trailer I called home. A few minutes later, he turned east, onto a road I’d never taken because it didn’t go anywhere except deeper into the woods and swamps of rural east Texas.

  “Do you drive out to run in the country every day?”

  “Pretty much. Sometimes we stick closer to home, but I prefer places where we won’t meet anybody. He needs at least two good runs a day. It’s not natural for a wolf to be stuck inside a house or a car all day, even if I have to be.”

  “You take him with you?”

  “We go everywhere together,” he said. “Wolves are pack animals. That thing people say about a lone wolf, it’s just wrong. Maybe, if I had some others, and a big enough yard … but I won’t make him live like a prisoner.”

  I’d had a dog when I was a kid, but not since. One thing I’d had in mind when I moved to Texas was to rent a place with a fenced yard and a landlord who wasn’t opposed to pets, and it was the detail that my new home had previously been used as a “hunting cabin” and included sizable kennels that made me agree to a year’s lease, sight unseen. But when I saw the kennels—the concrete floor, the high chain-link fence—they looked like Guantanamo.

  “You got a problem with that?” He challenged my silence.

  “Not at all. I’d love to have a dog, but I couldn’t leave it alone five days a week. I guess it’s even more important, if you’re going to buy a wolf—”

  “I didn’t buy him.”

  I gazed ahead at the empty road, dappled with long shadows, and the dark depths of the forest on either side. “You found him?”

  He made a noise that might have been agreement, and I said, “A full-grown wolf? He must have belonged to somebody. Couldn’t you find his owner?”

  His face showed nothing, but his hands tightened on the steering wheel. “If I could find the bastard who had him first, I’d kill him. Slowly. I’d make him die in agony, do to him what he wanted to do to my wolf.”

  The icy malice in his voice chilled me. “What happened?”

  “It was just after I’d gotten back from”—he hesitated—“well, that doesn’t matter. I’d been away, and then I came back. About two years ago. I grew up in these parts, and when I was a kid, I used to go hunting and fishing and camping in the Thicket, but not after I grew up. I hadn’t set foot in the woods for ten years, at least, until that day I suddenly got this urge. I just wanted to get away from everybody and everything, away from civilization, so I drove east, into the woods, and turned off the highway onto one of the old timber routes, and drove until it was too rough and grown over to drive any farther, and then I left the car.

  “I kept to the trail, of course. Everybody who grows up in these parts knows how easy it is to get lost if you don’t. There are stories about people getting lost for days within a couple miles of the road, that’s how thick and tangled it is. You can be in the middle of a swamp before you know it, with that kind of mud that sucks you down.

  “I knew how it was. I’m not stupid. But after I’d been walking for about an hour, I started feeling that this old road wasn’t going to take me where I had to go. Had to go. I didn’t know why, or where it was, but I felt more and more that there was some point to this trip, and if I kept to the trail, I was never going to find out what it was.

  “So I left the trail. I used my knife to mark my path, so I could find my way back. I’d done it before, only back then, I’d had a reason—a deer I’d shot but hadn’t killed, a duck or a quail I’d brought down into the brush—and this time the only thing I was following was some kind of instinct or intuition.”

  He shook his head, gazing out at the road ahead but seeing, I was sure, the forests in his mind. “I’m not somebody who gets ‘feelings,’ you know? I never believed in that woo-woo psychic spirit stuff. I still don’t, except …” He scowled, gripping the wheel harder, and behind us, Lobo gave a deep sigh.

  “I can’t explain why I left the trail and slashed my way deeper into the woods, why I went that way and no other. But I did, and I reckon I walked at least a mile, to a place so far off the map you’d swear nobody else had been there in about a century, except that there was this wolf, chained by the neck to a tree, and he damn sure hadn’t done that to himself.

  “I thought he was dead, at first. I thought I’d come too late. But then as I crouched next to him, I felt his heart still beating. It was a near thing, though. God knows how long he’d been stuck there, with no chance of freeing himself, with nothing to eat or drink.”

  Angry tears started to my eyes. “Who’d do such a thing?”

  “A person.” He almost spat the word. “In the old days, people told their kids stories about the big, bad wolf, and men who were especially cruel and horrible were said to be like animals, maybe werewolves. But the things ordinary men do every day are a million times worse than anything a wolf would do. A wolf would never torture another animal to death, or lock it up. They kill out of instinct, in order to survive, because they have to—not because they just feel like it, not because they’re evil. Not like us. Man is the scariest animal on the planet, but from the beginning of time, the wolf has gotten the bad rap. We’ve tried to pretend that evil is out there, lurking inside animals beyond the campfire, and not where it really is, in here.” He tapped his chest.

  “You saved his life.”

  “Yeah. And he changed mine.” He shrugged. “Don’t they say, if you save a life, you take responsibility for it? I guess I could have taken him to one of those animal-rescue places, but that would have been like leaving him to die in prison, or risk him falling into the hands of some other sadistic bastard. It was up to me to make sure that the life I’d saved was worth living. It’s not that hard, you know. Enough food, plenty of exercise outdoors, companionship. Lucky we like the same things.”

  As he spoke, he took a sudden turn off the road, hardly slowing as we moved onto a heavily rutted, unpaved track. I held on for dear life as we rocked and bounced deeper into the forest.

  “I thought this was a state park?” The way the trees loomed over us, old and heavy with moss, so thick they blocked the sun, made me uncomfortable.

  “Some of the Thicket’s a national preserve, but we tend to steer clear of their trails,” he said. “No pets allowed, and if too many people start seeing a wolf, they might come looking for the wolf-man. This old road here, it was used for logging. I think it winds up in some old ghost town. There’s all sorts of old forgotten stuff in here.”

  He parked off-road, in a small clearing. He opened his door, got out, opened the back door, and stood looking in at the wolf, who was standing on the backseat, absolutely still, utterly focused. One charged moment passed in silence, then Cody barked, “Go free!” and the wolf leaped out of the car, the most beautiful, graceful thing I’d ever seen. He seemed to fly, and in motion, he was perfect, so beautiful it made my che
st ache.

  “You okay?”

  Cody was staring at me. I had to blink hard, but managed not to sniff as I nodded and said, “He’s just so … amazing.”

  He went on looking at me for an uncomfortably long time before he nodded, slowly, and said, “More than you know. Will you be okay here by yourself?”

  I nodded, but I really wasn’t sure.

  He handed me his keys. “If you get too hot, run the air conditioner for a while, listen to some music if you get bored. Does your phone have a camera?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Just, if you see an ivory-billed woodpecker, you want to be sure to get a picture.”

  It was only when he flashed me a grin that I realized he was teasing, and managed to respond: “Actually, I was hoping to see Bigfoot.”

  I watched him go, light and strong and quick on his feet as he sprinted away into the deep, shadowy forest, and although his movements didn’t have the amazing grace of the fleet, four-legged animal, still he had his own male, human beauty, and when he vanished into the dark, I felt something squeeze my heart.

  IT WAS STILL hot and almost unbearably humid, even so late in the day, even though it was already October, but I was afraid of draining the battery if I ran the air-conditioning, so instead of curling up in relative comfort with one of my books, I wandered. I kept to the trail, of course, and peered into the undergrowth in hope of seeing one of the rare orchids or carnivorous plants that flourished in these parts.

  I didn’t find anything rare, and I got bitten to pieces by mosquitoes before deciding, fairly swiftly, to turn back. I didn’t belong here. Once in the clearing again, knowing that I had the option of locking myself inside the SUV, or even driving away, I felt better. There was a sinister atmosphere about this patch of southern woodland, or maybe I just thought so after Cody’s story. Everybody knows there are people who delight in cruelty to animals, and if Cody had told me he’d rescued the wolf from starvation in somebody’s garage or basement, I would not have been surprised. But why would anyone go so far into a trackless wilderness to chain and abandon, to condemn to a lingering death, such a beautiful, innocent animal?