Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

  The rifle felt heavy on his back as he walked, the butt bouncing against his waist. No sound in the forest except for his own footsteps and the rush of wind in the trees. Farther on he heard the stream, a slight gurgle of water, endless as the slope he now found himself descending.

  As he came down and found the bottomland before the stream, he saw his father a hundred feet on. Crouched with his back to Drake and his arms outstretched over a deadfall. A bright green wall of salmonberry leaves and currant bushes separating the streambed from the dark undergrowth of the forest. Patrick so still that it forced the words to Drake’s mouth before he quite knew he was saying them. Throwing his voice forward as he called to his father.

  Only then did Drake catch the movement far down the stream, the brief wheel of fur as something bounded up from the water and moved for the forest. He saw too the quick snap of his father’s arms and the red dart flush out of the gun. The sound loud in the silence of the forest, as the wolf sprang up, visible for a second in the morning sun, yelping in pain. The red dart now hanging from her hindquarter.

  THE WOLF LAY on her side fifty yards from the stream. The slight pulse of her lungs as she took air and then gave it back, moving the dirt beneath her snout. She was bigger than Drake had thought. A full six feet from tail to head, standing on her hind legs she would be as big as a man, and looked to weigh between ninety and a hundred pounds. Lying there, drugged, under all that fur it was hard to say. Drake knew just by looking at her that she was older, or perhaps sick, the gray and white fur matted in places where she had ceased to care for herself.

  “A hell of a shot,” Drake said. It was the first thing he’d said to his father since he found him at the edge of the stream. A sheen of sweat visible on Patrick’s skin. The wolf leading them up a steep grade before collapsing under the power of the tranquilizer.

  With Ellie’s rifle still in Patrick’s hands he pushed the barrel into the side of the wolf, testing her. “You didn’t make it any easier.”

  “They keep a rifle range in the prison for you to practice on?” Drake saw his father smile for a moment. His teeth there, then gone again in a flash. “How’d you even know the wolf would be down there?”

  “I followed her.”

  “Followed her from where?”

  “From the camp,” Patrick said, glancing back in the direction they’d come from. “She was out there circling us most of the night.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe whatever you want,” Patrick said. “You get real used to picking up on small sounds when you’re locked up in prison. Especially if you’re an ex-cop.”

  “I still don’t believe it,” Drake said, shaking his head.

  Ten minutes later he came back with Ellie and the three of them got the wolf weighed. Ellie put a GPS collar around the neck, then started down through the list, taking samples of fur and blood, swabbing the mouth and checking the teeth. To Drake it seemed like there were a million things she had to do, checking them off on a laminated sheet as she came to them. The animal unconscious through it all.

  Drake helped Ellie as she worked, pulling the fur away for her as she took the blood, or holding a small penlight to better view the wolf’s dark pupils and yellow corneas. The whole while Patrick squatted close by, keeping to himself as he watched.

  Afterward, when Ellie had finished and Patrick had gone back to camp ahead of them, Ellie said, “You have any idea what he was up to?”

  “My father?” Drake asked, watching the animal from about fifty feet away, waiting for it to wake up. “He said he heard her outside the tent last night.”

  “Could you have made that shot?” Ellie asked.

  Drake shook his head. He knew shooting a tranquilizer wasn’t like shooting a bullet. It was slower. The shot had to allow for the lag. If an animal stayed still at that distance, there was a chance of getting the dart in where you wanted it. If the animal was running it was a lot harder, and if the animal was surprised, as this one had been, it was nearly impossible. “It was a hell of a shot,” Drake said.

  DRAKE’S FATHER HAD been the one to teach him how to shoot. Nine years old with the rifle raised over the alder fence out behind their house, aiming at apples. The echo of the shots carried far up the valley, bouncing from one slope to the other. Silver Lake much smaller then, simply a few houses, a general store, and one diner. No one to care about the sound of a hunting rifle carried in the air. The yellow-white flesh of the apples spread everywhere in the grass. One shot out of three hitting its mark. And his father telling him how to hold the gun, how to keep it cradled into the meat of his shoulder, where his deltoid met the muscle of his breast.

  The skin bruised from one weekend to the next. More apples and more shooting until he missed only one shot out of six, and then one out of seven. The apples bursting up out of the grass with every shot, and the rich warm smell of the dirt beneath coming to him out of the orchard. His own boyhood encompassed in this.

  The smell of Ivory soap on his hands, the tang of gunpowder in the air like the crack of fireworks on the Fourth of July. And always the deep sweetness of the apples everywhere as he shucked one shell and loaded another, taking aim where his father pointed. Wanting more than anything for his shots to fly true.

  IT WAS FOUR hours before Drake came in the door with his father close behind. The hike down had taken them less time than the day before; they stopped fewer times as they moved down the slope with the blue sheet of the lake laid out before them. The wolf somewhere behind, groggy but awake, the GPS collar already sending its signal to a satellite far overhead.

  With the door open, Drake let the air into the house. Crisp spring air smelling mineral as cracked rock, and the cool feel of the lake air spreading through the house. The windows all closed up and a note from Sheri telling Drake she’d gone in to cover a shift for one of the other girls.

  Drake ran the water from the kitchen tap, watching the sun filter in through the windows. His father in Drake’s boyhood room and the packs left out on the living room floor with their boots. When the water was cool enough, Drake put a hand beneath the tap and cupped the water to his face. The grit coming off in muddy whorls that showed like tree knots in his palms.

  He washed his hands and dried them by running his fingers up over his thin hair. All through the forest he’d thought about how he’d picked up his rifle that morning, ready to use it. But ready to use it for what? The wolf? His father? He didn’t know what he had been afraid of. He knew only that he had been.

  He looked in on the living room. The rifle still there, still strapped to his pack as it had been all down the mountain. His father’s pack and boots not far off. His own boots tucked away by the door, the toes caked with forest mud, and the laces frayed from long use and many days away in those same hills his father was so familiar with.

  There wasn’t a thing Drake could say about what he was feeling. No one he could talk to. What Driscoll had told him about Patrick, about Gary, it wasn’t right. None of it was, and Drake knew it would eat away at him until he knew the truth. He couldn’t go on like this, mistrusting his own father, feeling like every minute of every day he needed to know exactly where Patrick was.

  Drake turned away from the packs and boots and went down the hallway. He stopped outside his old room and looked in through the open doorway. Patrick lay on the bed in his hiking clothes, his feet dangling off the side of the bed as if he didn’t want to sully the sheets.

  Drake stepped inside and sat at the computer desk, looking across the room at his father. “I want to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead then.” The same smile on his face that Drake couldn’t read. Crooked and then gone again before Drake got a feel for it.

  “When I picked you up from prison you told me you wouldn’t cause me any trouble. You said you were done with that.” Drake took his time. He was trying to get the words right. He needed to know the answer, but first he needed to know how to ask the question. Something he’d w
anted to ask his father ever since Driscoll had met him at the front of his driveway. “You meant what you said to me?”

  Patrick stared mutely back at him from the bed. He raised a hand and rubbed his cheek, feeling the white scruff that had covered his face in the last day. “I don’t plan on being around here long,” Patrick said, “if that’s what you’re asking. I’d like to make my own way. I don’t need to depend on you and Sheri. This place hasn’t been mine for a long time now and I see you two have made a home here.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Drake said. He felt embarrassed. He hadn’t meant to make his father feel unwanted. “This is your house, too.”

  “We both know that’s not true anymore.”

  Drake looked around the room, if only to focus his thoughts. Sky-blue paint and the colors of sunset. “I meant to say you’re welcome here.”

  “I just need a few days,” Patrick said; he was up now, sitting on the bed with his feet on the floor, moving his hands as he talked. “There’s outreach programs for people like me. If I stay in town I can chop logs, or I can maybe see if there’s some work with the Department of Forestry. I don’t know if they’d take me, but I’d be willing to give it a try.”

  “That sounds fine,” Drake said. He tried to imagine who his father would have been if he hadn’t gone to Monroe, if he’d just stayed the sheriff of a little town in the North Cascades. The thought seeming foreign even to Drake. Patrick’s whole identity wrapped up in the fact that he’d smuggled drugs, that he was a crooked sheriff from a place no one had ever heard of until Patrick put them all on the map.

  Drake went on trying to discern a future for his father as he looked at the man, sitting there on the bed. Worn out. Burned out. Busted up from a life that hadn’t been meant to be. There were programs for people like him. Support groups, ways for men like Patrick to make their own way in this world. Even with a history like his father’s.

  “I never meant to say you weren’t welcome here,” Drake said. He knew he was backpedaling but he couldn’t help it. He got up from the computer chair and walked to the doorway, putting one hand on the frame.

  “I’ll talk to some people,” Patrick said. His words hesitant, stumbling one after the other. Patrick just sitting there looking up at his son where he stood at the entrance to the room. Drake knowing he’d come in to talk to his father about one thing, but, in the end, forced the issue of another.

  “That sounds fine, Dad.” Drake could feel himself shrink back inside as he watched his father. The man seemed oblivious to what Drake was hinting at. Desperate, too. The veneer of his words beginning to crack and Drake wishing he could make what he’d said disappear.

  “We okay?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes,” Drake said.

  HIS FATHER WAS in the shower when Drake came back to the room. For a good minute he stood there in the doorway looking everything over. Forcing himself to see the crib and changing table, the bands of color on the walls and the pale stars fixed to the ceiling.

  Down the hall he could hear the shower through the bathroom door. The water going and the sound of his father in there.

  All the dreams Drake had had for the room. All they had filled it with. All that it was now.

  He knew there were other times he could come to the room, when his father was out with Sheri, or away looking for work, but Drake couldn’t wait any longer. He didn’t want to believe what Agent Driscoll had told him. He needed to know whether his father was guilty or not. He needed to know for sure.

  The changing table was opposite the bed. Patrick’s clothes kept in the drawers beneath. Drake went through this first, opening each drawer and going through them top to bottom. By the time he finished he was on his knees with every drawer open in front of him. He turned and looked around the room. Not sure what he was looking for, but knowing he had to look, that if he didn’t he would always wonder.

  It was only when he came to the bed that he saw the cardboard box pushed in under the frame. The container of mementos barely visible from the darkness.

  Drake got up and went to the bed. Sitting, he removed the box and pulled it out onto the floor. Twelve years of his father’s life in one container, wooden figurines made in the prison shop, the letters Drake’s grandfather, Morgan, had sent to Patrick. A few letters from Sheri, a couple worn paperbacks without their covers, and the manila folder Patrick had tried to show Drake on the drive up from Monroe.

  Drake pulled this up and opened the folder, looking down at the aged clippings. The newsprint gone yellow, cracked and dotted with pinholes or marked with tape at the corners where his father had probably secured these relics to his cell wall. Patrick said he’d kept them all, every article. And Drake went through them one by one. All of them in order, from the ten-page Silver Lake Weekly announcing Drake’s basketball scholarship to Arizona, to the Seattle Times article the day after he got himself shot in a North Seattle neighborhood.

  He laid them on the bed as he came to them. Articles he didn’t even know existed. A high score from when he’d shot twenty-eight in one game. Speculations by the local papers on the team’s chances for a tournament, or even who among them might go on to a higher level of play. All of this carefully stacked, one after the other, in the folder. The clippings aged and yellowed, kept together with paper clips and bits of tape. All like some sort of family album locked up for years in the basement safe.

  It was a long time since Drake had allowed himself to think of those years. When he’d been a young man, a couple years past high school, living in another state, in a city a hundred times bigger than Silver Lake, playing basketball.

  Drake loved it all. The running endlessly, one end of the court to the other. The quick shots, the passes from player to player, the fade, the rebound, the way the world never seemed to pause in all that time and one action fed into the next like a flood of water carrying everything else along.

  It was the beginning of his third year when he went into his coach’s office to tell him about the trouble back home. Telling his coach all the things the newspapers were saying about his father. And the coach standing up from his desk and walking around to sit facing Drake, trying to work through it all, trying to tell Drake he would always have a place on the team. Though Drake knew—no matter what the coach said—that the offer could wait only so long.

  Drake sat in his father’s room, a room that had once been his own, and looked the articles over. Many of the clippings were about him, but the majority of them were about his father, about his arrest and then later conviction. That time in Drake’s life almost a complete wash. Like he’d been there and not there all at the same time. Gary had come to the airport to pick Drake up and told him how Patrick had been led into the courtroom for his sentencing. How even in the week since he’d been arrested, Patrick seemed to have lost weight, shrunk back into himself. The jumpsuit too big on his frame and the shuffling, almost hesitant, steps he took as he came out into the court, his eyes downcast on the floor.

  Drake had tried to picture it all then, but he couldn’t get a grasp on it. The man Gary was describing so unlike the man Drake had grown up with, leading him on horseback through the hills. Camping in the high meadows in the years before he’d left for Arizona and listening to the rut of elk as they brought their antlers together late in the evening. Drake and Patrick rising from the small butane stove to stand watching as the big animals clawed the earth a hundred yards away, diving at each other with lust-filled abandon. The clash of their fighting echoing off the rocks high above while Drake and Patrick looked on.

  Later Drake would sit in the courtroom with his grandfather and listen to the charges laid against Patrick. The trial going on for five days and then the judge waiting as the jury gave their verdict, listening to the foreman go down through the charges. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

  Drake shuffled the articles in his hand. He’d read them all. He’d been a part of many of them, seen most of it with his own eyes as the reporters sat a couple rows back
scribbling notes on paper. All of it taking shape. Drake’s vision of his father slowly cracking, until finally it had all crumbled, flake by flake, as his father was led away and Drake sat watching.

  The articles dropped off until Drake saw his own name mentioned again in the Seattle paper. The story not about his basketball career anymore, but his role as a deputy, his father’s history, and the arrest Drake had tried to make in the mountains outside Silver Lake ten years after his father had gone away. An attempt that would eventually get him shot, leaving him as close to death as Drake ever cared to be.

  He looked at them all, shuffling back through each clipping on the bed, trying to make sense of it. His life in this valley. His father’s life. The two so dissimilar from each other, but in many ways the same.

  Everything his father, Patrick Drake, had ever done. Every highlight and failure. His rise as sheriff, the death of his wife to leukemia, and his eventual fall, outlined there for the world to see. And not a single article in his father’s collection mentioning the two dead men outside Bellingham.

  What had Patrick said to Ellie on his first day out? Don’t get caught.

  Drake looked up from the articles and saw his father staring in at him. His bald scalp still wet from the shower. His eyes red and worn from the water. “Is this why you came in here earlier?” Patrick asked.

  Drake followed his father’s eyes to the open drawers beneath the changing table, all of the clothes in disarray, hanging loose over the sides. The cardboard box on the bed next to Drake with the articles spread everywhere on the mattress.

  “You don’t trust me,” Patrick said. He was wearing a towel around his waist, standing there in the doorway. He was staring at Drake with an intensity Drake could only remember from when he’d been a child.

  “There have been things said about you that I can’t ignore,” Drake responded, keeping his eyes focused on the door frame near his father’s head. Looking but not looking.