Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

“She was thinking you’d go out tomorrow, early, as soon as the sun is up.”

  Drake collected his hat and stood. He was holding it in his hand and about to turn when Gary said, “Son, don’t put too much faith in your buddy Driscoll. He was around here a good amount when your father went away. There was a lot of media and law enforcement throwing crazy theories around and he was one of the main guys throwing the mud.”

  Drake ran his fingers under the band of his hat. His eyes on the floor, feeling exposed.

  “Andy’s oldest daughter went to school with that girl over at the doughnut shop, Cheryl. Maybe it comes with the job, but the girl likes to get in people’s business—she likes to talk, too, and it just worked its way up through the grapevine. It’s the nature of a small town. I wouldn’t think too much on it. I’ve been expecting we might see Agent Driscoll around here again at some time.”

  Drake let himself out and closed the door. Andy and Luke at their desks. Drake went and sat in his chair. He felt defeated. He had no clue what to think about any of it, but mostly he just felt pissed off. Until an hour ago he’d thought Driscoll was his friend, now he was saying one thing and Gary was saying another. Two people Drake had always trusted.

  Drake sat at his desk and looked around the office. Whatever seed Driscoll had planted was growing. Roots coiling around his chest like a vine on a tree and Drake there in the office scared to see how it bloomed.

  DRAKE MADE IT into the early afternoon before he went back into Gary’s office and asked to take the rest of the day off.

  When Drake pulled up to the house he saw his father one hundred feet away at the edge of the clearing where the apple orchard ran out and the alder fence had once sat. Patrick stood there for a moment and then bent a knee into the grass, where with one hand he seemed to be looking something over. He wore a set of jeans and one of his old flannels. His scalp and beard shaved clean. And the newly exposed skin white and puckered in places where the razor had nicked his neck and jawline.

  Drake slipped the car into park. For a while he watched his father where he knelt at the edge of the clearing. He didn’t know what to think about the man. And it was only when Drake got up out of the cruiser and closed the door that his father raised his eyes to Drake.

  By the time he made it across the orchard to his father, Patrick was standing again. “I’ve never seen you in the uniform,” Patrick said. His eyes on Drake, taking in the cop browns he wore.

  Drake tried to smile. He looked Patrick over and then he looked back at the house, where he could see Sheri’s profile through one of the kitchen windows.

  “You get off early?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes,” Drake said, turning back to his father. “Gary let me go. I thought I’d just come home for a little while. What’s been going on?”

  “Sheri showed me around. We picked up some groceries, had lunch, really just took it easy.”

  “And now?”

  Patrick bent and lifted something from the grass. “I came to look the fence over.” In his hand was a rotted piece of alder. “I was thinking maybe I could help you build it again—maybe this weekend? With the two of us we could finish in an afternoon.”

  “Yeah,” Drake said. “I don’t see why not.” He looked his father over one more time and then made an excuse about getting out of his work clothes. He said good-bye and then, halfway to the house, turned and saw his father still there at the edge of forest, picking pieces of rotten alder from the ground.

  Later, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, Drake came into the kitchen and stood watching Sheri peel carrots over the sink. “You never left him alone the whole day?”

  She told him that his father had slept until ten. Then they’d walked to the lake, and gone shopping for that night’s meal.

  “How long has he been out there?”

  “Not long,” Sheri said.

  Drake took the few remaining steps to where she stood. Through the window he watched his father carry a load of wood and dump it into the burn pile out behind the house. “So you never left him alone the whole day?”

  “He went to the bathroom on his own,” Sheri said. “I didn’t sign up for anything like that.” Sheri was laughing now, looking to Drake like she thought the joke was so funny. Like she belonged on a stage in front of a packed house.

  All Drake could think about was the money and if his father had somehow stashed it under the bathroom floorboards, or in a waterproof bag in the porcelain tank. All of his ideas ridiculous. He was turning into his father, seeing things that were not there.

  Chapter 4

  THE MAN CAME IN wearing a black suit, ill fitted to his skinny body, and ordered two coffees and a Danish to go. While he waited he tapped his fingernails in rhythm to the stereo playing behind the counter and watched the girl walk away to the coffee machine, where she filled the two cups. When she came back he thanked her and paid.

  He balanced the two coffees in the claw of his upturned palm. And as he went out the door, holding it with his hip, he already saw how the Danish had begun to stain the small paper bag. The paper turned waxen with pastry grease in the cold early evening air.

  When he took his seat in the car again, he gestured to the glove box, asking the big man for a pen and paper, all the while watching the shop and drinking from his cup of coffee. As the minutes passed, they kept time by checking a prepaid cell phone they’d picked up at a convenience store and that they’d charged while driving.

  They sat in the car for an hour before the girl closed the shop. When she was about a block up they started the car and pulled forward, coming even with the girl as she stopped at the corner.

  The skinnier of the two men drove, slowing to make pace with the girl. He put the window down and called to the girl by name.

  The girl paused, her eyes searching the face that looked up at her from the driver’s-side window. “Hello?” she said, unsure at first. And then as she recognized the face staring out at her from inside the car. “How was the coffee?”

  “It’s Cheryl, isn’t it?” the man said. His hair was slicked back and the suit was too big on his thin bones. He had one arm out the window and he moved his hand while he talked, gesturing to the uniform she wore. “It’s right there on your name tag.”

  She turned and looked back toward the shop and then looked around her. The sun was almost gone down, a pale light now hanging in the air to the west and the street blue with shadow.

  “You know Deputy Drake?” the man asked. “And maybe you met our boss Frank Driscoll today? They were in your shop earlier.”

  “You guys work for the DEA?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and then stepped forward, bending a little to take in both men.

  “Have you seen either of them?” the skinny man went on. “Driscoll asked us to come up. He said there might be some trouble with Deputy Drake’s father. Driscoll gave us the address but we’re having a hard time.” He held out a coffee-stained piece of paper for her to see. The address, written in blue ink, clouded and distorted with dried liquid.

  She stepped up to the black car, a foot’s distance from its open window, and took the small piece of paper from the man. She looked the address over and then gave it back. “I can see why you’d have trouble with this,” she said.

  “Some of the coffee spilled. It’s important we find the deputy’s place.”

  “Is Bobby in some sort of danger?”

  “We don’t think so but Driscoll asked us to come up. We heard they had coffee in your shop this morning. Would you mind showing us the address?”

  The girl looked around on the street. The sound of plates and cutlery could be heard far down the block from the open kitchen window of the Buck Blind. The girl hesitated, looking to the restaurant a few hundred feet away. “You can’t call your boss?”

  “That’s the thing,” the skinny man said. “We’re already late. He probably wouldn’t be too happy.”

  She looked in at the two men and told them it was only
a couple minutes away. The big man in the passenger seat was dressed informally in a worn pair of jeans and a padded flannel button-up. The last few buttons on the shirt left loose at the collar to allow for the rolls of skin that appeared below his jaw.

  The driver turned and looked back down the street and then when he turned back, still holding the coffee-stained address between his fingers, said, “You show us where it is and we’ll have you back in five minutes.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “Yep, you’d really be helping us out.” He reached behind him and pushed the door open from the inside. “Get in,” he said. “We’ll bring you right back.”

  She stepped in and brought the door closed behind her.

  When they came to the intersection with the dangling caution light she told them where to turn and they followed the lake road. The shadow of the mountains over much of the lake, but far to the east a sliver of gold was still visible on the water.

  “You heard what Driscoll was saying to the deputy today?” the man asked.

  “Some of it,” she said.

  The man smiled up at her reflection in the rearview. “So you were eavesdropping?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “It’s okay if you were,” the man said, kidding her still, his smile wide beneath his thin lips. “If the deputy is in trouble it’s better we hear about it sooner than later.”

  “I didn’t hear anything really. They were talking about his father,” Cheryl said. “You’re here about his father, right? So you must know the story about him.”

  “We’ve heard some stories.”

  The man watched her in the rearview and when they came to the driveway leading to the Drake property Cheryl pointed it out and told them how far up the house was. “Are you two here to take him back to prison?” she asked.

  The man looked up at her in the rearview again and then broke away. He was driving on the lake road still, Drake’s driveway now a quarter mile behind them. “What’s up ahead here on this road?” the man asked.

  “Nothing. Logging. A couple more houses.”

  “Can you keep a secret?” the man asked. His eyes were on her again and with his free hand he touched a button and dropped all the locks on the doors.

  The sound made Cheryl jump, her fingers to the door handle before she knew she had placed them there. When she looked back to the front, the big man was climbing over the seat with one large hand outstretched toward her.

  Chapter 5

  DRAKE SAT ON THE back stairs, drinking a beer and staring out on the orchard. The sky tinged a deep blue in the west and the first stars already showing. The little garden Sheri kept, dug out and lined with earth-turned rows.

  He put the beer to his lips and tipped the bottle back. He’d given it a lot of thought through the day. What Driscoll had said, what Gary had tried to tell him, his father. It was all a mess. Drake kept running it around in his head. A footrace that never seemed to have an ending, just around and around until someone dropped dead.

  He scuffed the heels of his boots over the dirt at the base of the stairs, digging a hole. The apple trees set in lines all the way to the forest. A patch of disturbed earth at the edge of the orchard where they’d buried their child in a grave the size of a shoebox. No one but them—and now Drake’s father—knowing anything about it. All of their lives somehow entwined by this fact.

  The new knowledge about his father adding to it all and piling on. He didn’t think he would tell Sheri about Driscoll’s coming to see him that morning, about what he had to say. He didn’t want her trying to guess, as he was now, whether there was any truth in the story. He didn’t want to add to the pressure. A feeling that had settled over Drake all through the day. Like everybody had agreed to take a ride on Drake’s back—Driscoll, Patrick, and Gary—all at once and none of them offering to get off.

  Drake took a swallow of the beer, tipping the bottle back, trying to calm his nerves. There was nothing he could do but wait it out, and when the spring on the kitchen door opened and then snapped shut, Drake already knew it was his father simply from the way the boards on the back porch took his weight. Drake didn’t turn and he waited for Patrick to come down the steps and sit next to him. His father’s hand on Drake’s shoulder as he sat. The first time they’d touched in twelve years. The feeling strange on Drake’s skin.

  “Thinking some deep thoughts?” his father asked. He was holding a beer in one hand and he twisted the top off with his other. When Drake didn’t respond, Patrick said, “This was always where I found you when you lost a basketball game.”

  “It’s been a while since high school,” Drake said. He finished the beer in one pull and set it on the step beside him. The smell of the yard all around him, fresh turned earth from a few days before, left to bake in the sun.

  “Sheri asked me what she should plant this year,” his father said. “I told her I don’t have a clue about that sort of thing. Your mother was always the one who dealt with the growing season.”

  Drake nodded. A desire in him to just come out with it. To tell his father everything.

  “You’ve made a life of it here,” Patrick said.

  “I’ve tried.”

  “Your mother kept a garden in the exact same spot.”

  Drake nodded again. “I remember.” He felt dazed, his body thrown off balance as he looked into the rows of turned earth, avoiding his father’s eyes.

  “I know you didn’t choose this life. Coming back here. Taking the job with Gary. I should have told you that earlier on,” Patrick said. “I meant to tell it to you years ago. I’m sorry about that.”

  Drake nodded.

  “It was easy money for me,” Patrick said. “Your mom died and by the time you finished high school there was so much debt. I couldn’t figure any other way. I was the sheriff, there was no moving up, there was no way to make more money. I really didn’t know what else to do.”

  Drake turned and looked Patrick over. The clean shave on his face. The way he used to look when Drake was a boy. The same familiar way Drake remembered seeing him every day. His hand running over the skin of his cheek and along his jawline as he talked, his fingers searching out the small imperfections, the little scrapes he’d given himself.

  “I could have waited,” Patrick went on. “There were things I could have done. Legal things. But I didn’t have the patience for it and the bank was telling me I needed to make my payments or they were going to take the house away. It felt like they were trying to take your mother away from me all over again.” Patrick held a hand to his face, pinching the bridge of his nose. The sound of his breath amplified in his palm, whistling between his fingers. “I know it was wrong,” he said. “It was all wrong . . .”

  Drake didn’t say anything, he didn’t want to speak, even knowing it was his turn, that his father wanted him to say something, Drake couldn’t do it. Patrick wanted him to tell him it was okay and the past was the past. At one time Drake thought maybe he could, but there just was no doing it now, not after everything he’d heard that morning. And now Drake feared if he said anything it would come out hateful, the words tearing up out of him like blood from a wound.

  “When your mother got sick I knew things would be different. And when she didn’t get better, when she kept getting worse, I knew the life we’d planned would never be.” Drake listened as his father took a sip off the bottle and then set it back on the wood. “Somewhere in there we jumped the tracks,” his father said. “One life going on the way it should have been, and another taking a completely different path.”

  “Dad, don’t talk to me about this anymore,” Drake said. His voice quivering in his throat. “I don’t want to hear it from you.” He felt the words slip up over his tongue and lash out. Nothing he could do to stop them, and a desire to simply spill it all out into the night air and be done with it.

  So much hate for his father. For the last twelve years, and more, he realized, all the way back to when he was a boy and his father had b
rought him to see his mother in the hospital. Hours away. The clinic in Silver Lake not equipped to handle things like cancer, like people who needed to be held up on life support, wired up into the electricity while machines did the work the body no longer could.

  Next to him on the stairs, he felt his father stand. “I needed to say that to you.”

  “You’ve said it.”

  “I’ll see you inside, then.”

  Drake heard his father turn and move up the stairs, the grit working beneath his shoes on the wood. “Dad,” Drake said. “I was going to tell you later, over dinner.” Drake paused, trying to get the words right, trying to calm the dangerous beat he felt in his heart. “I’m headed into the hills tomorrow, west of the lake. We’ll be tracking that wolf. Ellie asked if you would come. I think I’d like you there as well.”

  A long silence followed. Drake picked up the empty bottle next to him and ran a fingertip over the top, finding the slight imperfection in the glass where the two edges had been sealed together in the factory. He thought about his father twenty-five years ago, his mother in the hospital bed, he thought about the years that followed. He thought about all that had happened twelve years before. He thought about the money, about Driscoll, and Gary, and his father.

  “Good,” his father said. “I’ve been meaning to get up into those hills.”

  AFTER DINNER DRAKE lay in bed next to Sheri and tried to close his eyes. The thoughts in his head going around and around without end.

  Sheri sat there with her back to the headboard. “You going to tell me what’s up?”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Drake said. His eyes still closed and his arms crossed over his chest beneath the sheets.

  “You didn’t say much during dinner, and those questions you were asking me before, about your father and where he’d been through the day. He can’t be that bad.”

  Drake turned away, opening his eyes and staring at the wall until Sheri put out the light. She was resting with her face to him and he felt her breath on the back of his neck and her body close into his. After five minutes had passed Drake asked, “What makes you trust him so much?”