Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

  “Not everything was in the papers.”

  “I guess not.”

  “I tend to think people know things about our family before they’ve even met us. I’m surprised Gary never told you that part.”

  She took the gloves from her hands and threw them into the trash can beneath the table. A dappling of sweat showed at her hairline where the examination light had caught her. “Gary barely says a thing and you won’t talk about him at all except to tell a few stories from his childhood. You’re not exactly forthcoming with all the information sometimes.” She walked over to her desk, where a topographical map of the surrounding mountains was spread. Little red marks all up and down the valley floor. “When you called this morning, you didn’t say anything about our wolf.”

  Drake shrugged. “I didn’t want you getting all excited about it.”

  “She’s becoming a problem.”

  “Better the deer than someone’s cow.”

  “That’s the problem,” Ellie said. “It’s only a matter of time before one of those ranchers starts shooting at her. She’s on her own and starting to look for the easy meal.” Ellie put a hand to the map, running a finger from one red mark to the next. “These are all the places where she’s been seen. She’s not just passing through at this point. Wolves hunt in pairs. Without a pack she’s pretty much just going to go for the easiest meal she can find. A calf, trash cans, or roadkill. All of which are related to humans.”

  Drake looked at the thin corridor of sightings, north to south along the lake, following the main road.

  “I want to collar her and see where she goes,” Ellie said. “When I can prove it’s an individual wolf, and I have her movements worked out, I can start to put a plan together. I want you to help me out.”

  Drake looked around the room, wondering for the slightest moment if she might have been talking to someone else. “I’m a little busy being a deputy,” Drake said.

  “I’m trying to save her,” Ellie said.

  “That’s all fine and good but I still don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  Ellie got up from the desk and untied the yellow apron from around her waist. Standing she came to Drake’s shoulders, petite with a swimmer’s broad arms and sculpted legs. Her size alone reminded Drake of how young she was, and how brand-new to Fish and Wildlife she seemed. Nothing worn away on her or piled up against the surface of her skin, like a cabin in the winter under all that snow. No scars, or pieces of her missing. Drake wanted her to stay just the way she was, twenty-four years old, doing exactly what she wanted with her life.

  Drake watched as she turned and hung the apron up on a hook by the door. By the time she turned back around she was already looking at him like something funny had been said. “I already talked this over with Gary.”

  “Christ,” Drake said. “You want to go on a wolf hunt? I’m people police. You understand that, right?”

  “He says you probably know the valley better than anyone.”

  “Christ,” Drake said again, this time hoping a prayer might be answered. “When?”

  “Tomorrow or the next day. Sooner the better.”

  “My father just got out.”

  “Bring him.”

  “No.” Drake waved off the statement, both hands in the air. “No way.”

  “After all these years you’d think you’d want to spend time with your father.”

  “You might think that, but I don’t.”

  “Like I said, he’s famous for knowing every inch of these mountains.”

  “And for being a convicted criminal,” Drake said. “Your words, not mine.”

  WHEN DRAKE GOT to the car his father was sitting in the passenger seat with the windows down looking toward the forest. The light slanting in through the trees, rich with pollen, and the sword ferns a nuclear green at the edge of the road.

  “Gary is the sheriff now?”

  Drake pulled open the door and then sat there looking at his hands on the wheel. Gary had been Patrick’s best friend. And when Patrick went away Gary had stepped in to help Drake get situated, taking Drake fishing, even giving him the job at the department.

  “He was the interim sheriff when you went away,” Drake said. “And then he was elected a year after.” Drake brought out the car keys from his pocket. “I thought you would have heard.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Patrick said, turning to Drake. He smiled a bit, coming out of whatever place his mind had taken him.

  His father had been gone a long time and Drake knew there were going to be times like this. Moments when the flash of a memory came across his father’s face and then went away again. A decision that was made a long time before and that absence in time—what could have been—the only thing left to regret.

  Patrick went on smiling and then he nodded toward the Fish and Wildlife hut as he came back to himself. “Did I cut in on your action?”

  It took Drake a second and then when he saw what his father was getting at his face flushed. “That’s not what that was about.”

  “Seems funny to me,” his father said. “All this time since we’ve seen each other and the first thing you want to show me in Silver Lake is the young Fish and Wildlife officer.”

  Drake started up the car and turned out onto the road. “That’s not it at all.” In the rearview mirror Drake watched the Quonset hut disappear around a bend in the road.

  “You know I haven’t even met Sheri yet. Seems like she’d be the one you’d take me to see first.”

  “I hope you’re not trying to be a dad,” Drake said.

  “She is your wife, right? Sheri?” Patrick smiled for a second and then looked away, watching the green thatch of the forest pass by out the window. Drake knowing that his father wanted him to say something, that the old man was just trying to egg him on like he had when Drake was a boy. His father trying to reconnect in the only way still familiar to him, like something lost long ago and then found.

  Ten minutes later they passed through the yellow caution light and turned up the lake again, heading toward the house. Sheri would be away at work, but he’d told her they’d be home in time for lunch, and even if she didn’t know, he felt an urge not to disappoint her. The sun above, almost directly over the lake. Nothing out on the water, and the thin glint of sunlight refracted off the chrome of a few logging trucks far down the other side of the lake.

  “Ellie is a local girl, isn’t she?” Patrick said. “Have Sheri and she met?”

  “I’m surprised no one shanked you in prison,” Drake said.

  “She’s young,” Patrick said. “I recognize her. Didn’t you go out with her older sister in high school?”

  “Are you planning to blackmail me?”

  “Just having a little fun,” Patrick said. “You seem pretty familiar with her. You see a lot of her?”

  Drake looked over at his father and then looked away. “You’re relentless,” Drake said. “I have to see Ellie for work, that’s all.” He wasn’t looking at his father but he could feel his father’s eyes on him and Drake was almost certain there was a grin to go along.

  When they came to the opening in the forest leading toward their house, Drake waited for a couple cars to pass. When they’d gone by, rocking the Chevy on its springs, he turned the wheel and the car came off the lake road and bounced down into the rutted gravel drive. The house was another hundred yards on, hidden beyond a curve in the road and behind a patch of trees. “Sheri is meeting you for the first time. I know it sounds strange to say now that you’re here, but it was sudden for us. Sheri’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Drake said.

  “I was told the probation was dependent on your approval,” Patrick said. “That was a month ago.”

  “I know,” Drake said. “She’s just nervous about it.” They took the turn in the drive and came into the clearing before the house. The gravel drive ending and the house there before them. The Sheriff’s Department cruiser Drake drove every day parked just to the side. The house
a two-bedroom rambler, one story in height, with a few steps leading up to a red door. Drake taking it in fresh as he tried to see it through his father’s eyes. Sheri and Drake had painted the house a few years back. The wood siding a light brown that the salesclerk at Home Depot had called sandstone. The trim around the windows painted white and the door a bright red color Sheri had said would make the house “pop.”

  Now Drake looked at it and didn’t know what to say. He was thinking about Sheri. He was thinking about all the changes that had been made since his father had owned the place and Drake had been a child there. They had taken out much of the furniture, repainted the walls inside, updated the bathroom, all of it an effort to try to make the place seem more their own. Now, with Patrick there, Drake didn’t know. He felt somehow like he’d been house-sitting all this time and as soon as he brought Patrick inside, the property would be his father’s again.

  Drake pushed the transmission up into park and sat looking out on the house. The red door and all that sat inside. “I meant to say that there’s been some problems lately.” Drake didn’t turn in his seat. He kept looking up at the house. “I don’t want you giving her a hard time. She really has always wanted to meet you.”

  “That thing about Ellie?” Patrick smiled. “I was just talking. I already told you I’m not going to give you any problems.”

  “That’s good,” Drake said. He opened the door and stood. He didn’t know what he was trying to say to his father. Or even how to say it. Whatever had been said somehow not enough. Everything, lately, not enough.

  DRAKE KNEW SHERI could keep a cool head about things. She’d been keeping a lot of things bottled up inside recently. But Drake didn’t know how cool that head would be if he, or his father, told Sheri that the Fish and Wildlife officer he’d been working with till two A.M. was Ellie Cobb. A girl from Silver Lake with whom Drake had a little history.

  Only the night before Ellie and Drake had sat up in the Fish and Wildlife truck for almost five hours. The truck pulled off the road, hidden beneath the trees, watching what passed for traffic in Silver Lake. Up above, circling high and wide over the valley, they occasionally heard the spotter plane Ellie had applied for a month before. The plane circling and looking down on the night forest below, marking headlights in the woods, and as soon as they had the locations they would go bouncing up logging roads or down old ranchers’ paths, trying to figure who was out there.

  Many of the places they’d found in the past month or so since the poaching had begun were just empty grass lots, barren of trees and thick with low-lying brush. Perfect for waiting out groups of grazing deer, spotlighting them with headlights, and then taking shots at them while they stood frozen in the light.

  Poaching had been a problem lately on the weekends, and through the night they were called to four different sites, but each time they arrived there was little there to indicate the plane circling above had gotten the location right. At the third lot they came to Drake could see a clear track in the mud and nearby a set of boot prints leading down the slope into the grass.

  About fifty yards in they found the bloodstain in the grass. A small depression made where the deer had gone down and then the poachers had lifted the animal and brought it back up the slope with them. There was no more sign than that and Drake knelt, looking the boot prints over, several of them there in the mud at his feet. Possibly two or three men from the size and shape of the tracks. Drake couldn’t say for sure.

  Ellie was back in her truck then, asking if the spotter plane had seen anything else, though Drake knew as soon as the poachers turned off their lights they pretty much disappeared beneath the trees.

  Ellie and Drake sat for a long time, watching the clearing, their own lights out now, and Drake leaning into the passenger-side window. Ellie occasionally radioing up to the spotter plane for an update while Drake watched moths land on the glass. The insects drawn out by the light of the moon, dusty legs perched along the slant of the windshield. Their wings spread wide, fluttering for a moment, then moving on again to some brighter place among the trees.

  They sat for another ten minutes before the radio crackled on again and the plane above gave them their next location. No more than a mile away. From where they sat looking out on the clearing, Drake could hear the crack of a high-powered rifle even from inside the cab of Ellie’s truck.

  “These guys are making a real night of it,” Drake said.

  Ellie turned the engine on and brought the truck around. “What are the chances they’re still there when we show up?”

  “Given what we’ve accomplished already, I’d say not very good.” They were cutting back along the logging road with just their parking lights on, trying to keep a low profile, and in twenty minutes, when they found the location, they would see nothing but a bloody depression in the grass, just like what they had found every weekend for months now.

  DRAKE SET THE keys on the counter and looked around. Sheri had left a note on the refrigerator telling Drake what time she would be home from work. The kitchen was completely clean, dishes put away, counter wiped down, a fresh set of towels hanging from the oven handle. Drake opened up the refrigerator and looked inside. Even the condiments had been organized inside the door. The leftovers from a few nights before neatly stacked in Tupperwares and the inside shelves soaped and cleaned. He closed the door without taking anything and went back to the counter.

  The kitchen, dining area, and living room all one L-shaped room. Standing there he could see the small four-seat dining table, and then farther out around the bend of the L he saw part of the living room, where it led away to the bedrooms. After he’d married Sheri, they’d made a real effort to make the place their own, switching out his father’s worn and mismatched furniture for a pair of sofas, a matching dining room table and buffet, and twin side tables for the living room. On one of the tables was the box his father had brought with him from Monroe. Drake stared at it for what seemed a long time, waiting until he heard the toilet flush and the door open down the hall.

  Drake walked out and stood waiting for his father. Patrick stepped from inside the bathroom, pausing to flip the light off, and then wiping his hands down his pants to dry them. He was looking at all the pictures on the walls as he passed. Some that Sheri had taken, others that Sheri’s mother had taken when Sheri was a girl. All black and white pastoral views of rolling farmland, or bent wood fencing. An artsy sort of thing that Drake had never quite understood, but that he’d grown used to and, truthfully, barely even noticed anymore. Everything, down to the two gray sofas in the living room, with their white piping, a sort of matching set.

  Drake watched his father study one of the pictures for a moment before moving on. He passed his old bedroom, the one Sheri and Drake had taken for their own, and he paused, putting a finger to the door and pushing it open on its hinges. Drake tried to imagine what Patrick saw inside. The queen bed with the tall dresser nearby. The sheets pulled all the way to the top of the mattress and tucked beneath a collection of pillows, each a different size and shape, but somehow all appearing to belong. The whole scene put together that morning by Sheri. Her hands tightening down the corners of the bedding, running her palms along the topmost sheet, smoothing the wrinkles before pulling the comforter across it all.

  Drake took a step and Patrick looked away from the room, noticing his son for the first time. “Different than you remember?” Drake asked.

  Patrick didn’t say anything and Drake wasn’t sure if he’d even asked the question aloud. Lately it had been like that. Like Drake had tried to say something but forgotten to work his lips. Whole moments seeming to disappear from focus, then snapping back into a reality more clear and bright than anything before.

  He watched his father step forward down the hall and push the door to Drake’s childhood bedroom open. The door hinges heard in the silence as Patrick looked inside. It was the bedroom that Sheri and Drake had agreed to fix up for Patrick. The one he would have while he stayed with t
hem.

  Patrick turned and looked to Drake. “You didn’t say anything about having a . . .”

  Drake watched his father try to find the words. Two blank eyes looking back at him. “There was a complication,” Drake said. “It’s been almost a month now. She was pregnant, but we lost it.”

  Patrick turned again and pushed the door farther open. He was silhouetted in the hallway, the dark opening of the bathroom door behind him down the hall. “How far along was she?”

  “Four months,” Drake said. “After three they say you’re in the clear.” He hadn’t moved from where he stood in the living room. He felt like he hadn’t moved in weeks. “We painted the room those colors because we didn’t know if it was going to be a girl or a boy. We thought we’d wait and see. Keep it a surprise.” Drake heard the words come out of his mouth but he wasn’t sure they were his. They were just words, mashed together, rushed, a series of observations, of hopes and thoughts on things that had never come to be.

  “It was our office. We waited till after the third month to start buying things. To get the crib and find a changing table,” Drake said. “I don’t know why we haven’t gotten rid of them now.” He took a few steps and found he was standing next to his father. “We don’t talk about it much. We keep the door closed.”

  What Drake didn’t say was how he’d come into the room a week ago to put the single bed together for his father. He didn’t say how he’d assembled it with the door closed and his back to the crib, trying not to look at the walls of the room, how they spread from light blue at the base, up toward the ceiling, where puffed white clouds were stenciled. The blue paint climbing farther up the walls, past the clouds, until it went pink, yellow, and orange like a sunset. The ceiling dotted with the same sort of glowing stars Drake remembered from his own childhood.

  THEY STOOD AT the edge of the orchard, Drake and Patrick, looking down at the small patch of disturbed earth.

  “Listen,” Drake said. “She doesn’t talk about it. We never even told anyone, we were going to wait until she started showing. Sheri didn’t want people whispering about her at the restaurant. She didn’t want to cut her hours until it was on her terms.”