Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

  The wet clothes grated on his skin but he didn’t stop. He took the turn to the driveway and ran, increasing his speed as he came to the house. Drake’s Chevy was missing and Drake turned and looked back down the drive. He spun and took in the clearing, his lungs heaving in his chest and a vein in his neck beating a constant rhythm under the skin. His cruiser was still there and as he passed he saw that the shotgun had been taken from the stand between the passenger’s and driver’s seats. He cursed under his breath and went up the stairs, still rushing to get inside.

  He called his wife’s name as soon as he was through the door. Only the television there to greet him. A rerun of some show from the seventies playing dully on the screen. Drake called his wife’s name again as he crossed the living room and entered the hallway. There was no response. When he came to the bedroom door and pushed it open he found out why.

  “Sheri?” he said. Slower now, letting the name linger there like he expected a response. None came.

  PART III

  MISSING. GONE. VANISHED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH

  Chapter 7

  IN THE EARLY LIGHT of morning the old man, Morgan Drake, crossed the grass field and went down into the hollow before the house, then up through the cottonwoods. His breath hard to come by and the beat of his pulse thumping in the thin flesh of his forehead. On a string he carried two prairie dogs and a small rabbit over his shoulder, all swaying to the cadence of his walk, slow and labored as he climbed toward the house. His balance measured with caution as he moved his weight to the next foot, making his way up out of the hollow. The creek there barely an inch deep and the water flowing fast and cool from the rain the night before. His pant legs wet to his knees from the grass and sage he had passed through just before morning, the sun inches below the horizon and the eastern sky glowing red like a cold thin fire along the prairie.

  He came up out of the cottonwoods and stood catching his breath. The little house there before him. Two front windows and a door. A porch of wood slats and the tin roof he’d put on himself five summers before. The rolling plains all around spotted with bunch grass and deepening growths of cheatgrass. Grown almost to his hips and darkened with the rain.

  Morgan crossed the last hundred or so feet and came out of the grass. He’d lived in the place for fifteen years. Through snowstorms that left drifts up to his windows, and through summers where the air thickened to the color of charcoal and huge plumes of smoke could be seen coming off the distant mountains, climbing dark into white clouds. Every morning his porch dusted with gray ash as if from some volcanic explosion.

  Except for the septic he’d done most of the work on the small house himself. The dirt road almost a mile in length patched and repatched with gravel he brought in on the bed of his pickup every spring. The grasslands all around slowly trying to take it back by growth or destruction. Mud holes and wallows forming in the depressions and corners when the land softened away from winter and the snow melted and bogged every low point on the plain. Often he stood on the porch and watched how the sun moved across the land, catching the light on the pools of water. The creek loud in the hollow and the leaves of the cottonwoods green with the snowmelt.

  Morgan left only once a month to run errands at the store. Buying those things that he could not grow or hunt for himself. His shopping list always much the same: propane, cigarettes, flour, butter, powdered milk, bacon, and whatever fresh greens were on hand. At times he bought things like chocolate and jam, and once a year he made a trip into the big Walmart outside Spokane for birdshot, trapping wire for snares, soap, shaving razors, and kerosene. Often taking his time to wander through the aisles, getting a sense of the way the world had changed around him in the year since.

  He was always alone and had grown used to it. At eighty-six he was older than most of the people he met at the little store in town and certainly older than even the retirees who greeted him at Walmart. Three summers before he’d met an old veteran from the Second World War who was eight years older than him and the two had sat on one of the benches outside the Walmart pharmacy for an hour comparing their lives. The next year he looked for the veteran but did not see him, and asking around, he heard that the man had passed sometime that spring.

  For a number of years Morgan’s only regular connection to the world had been his son. The two sending each other letters that Morgan would sit up and read again and again by the kerosene lamp he kept on his table, or by the light of the small iron stove. The words dancing on the page as the firelight in the belly of the open stove lit the room.

  The old man’s life had not been good and for a time he had felt that his son’s would be better. Only it hadn’t, and the same things that had seeped slowly but accurately into Morgan’s life had seeped into his son’s as well. Guilt and disappointment, hope for something better that never came, and a desire for relief that always seemed just beyond. This feeling of dissatisfaction the old man had come to understand, because it was how the world sometimes worked and he knew—through reading his son’s letters—his son had not yet concluded.

  DRISCOLL KNEW THE girl as soon as he saw her. The neck broken and the skin bruised a deep purple just beneath her jawline. They were a quarter mile up the lake on one of the muddy logging tracks. The early morning light starting to break through the trees and slip down among the trunks into the undergrowth. To the side of the road one of Gary’s deputies was vomiting and the other stood back a ways with a roll of police tape he hadn’t yet fed across the road, but that he was supposed to.

  “You recognize her?” Gary asked. He stood to the side of the open trunk, giving Driscoll his room.

  “She worked at the doughnut shop in town.”

  “Yes she did.” The deputy dry-heaved once more and Gary went on. “Andy’s daughter grew up with her. They graduated high school together.”

  “You wanted me to see this?”

  “I called you, didn’t I? You had a conversation with Bobby in this girl’s doughnut shop. I want to know what you talked about. I want specifics. I want to know why this girl goes missing the very same day.”

  Driscoll could feel Gary’s eyes on him. He could feel the hate, the way the man seemed to blame him for this. Driscoll didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know if this was his fault. He just kept staring down at the girl, her chin pointed up and to the side like some sort of seabird washed up on a beach. Only it wasn’t a beach, it was the trunk of a black Lincoln Town Car.

  “How far is this from Bobby’s place?” Driscoll asked. He was looking over the girl still, unable to take his eyes from her. Behind, pushed back within the shadows of the trunk was another body. A man stripped to his boxers. His face a bloody mash, the cheeks and nose so swollen that the eyes were pinched shut.

  “Close,” Gary said. “It’s the next drive south of here.”

  “Did you call Bobby about this? Have you seen or talked to him this morning?”

  “I went by there on my way out here. No one was home. With Patrick gone I don’t blame them for keeping up the search.”

  Driscoll turned and looked to where the other deputy was tying the police tape off at the side of the road. The forest to the south now visible and the shadows gathered dense between the trunks. The big pines for a hundred yards almost a singular living thing. And then, kneeling with his calves pushed into the backs of his thighs, Driscoll squinted and saw farther on the first of the apple trees in Drake’s orchard. “We need to get over there right now,” Driscoll said.

  MORGAN DRAKE DID not have a phone nor any way to get ahold of him except the mail, and when he went into town for his necessities he stopped by the small post office and picked up his letters. He was a reader of books and many times when he picked up his mail there would be a number of packages from the store up in Spokane he subscribed to. His letters and packages bound together with twine usually amounted to no more than a couple inches altogether. It was only through the books that he had made his first friend in a long time. A woman who worked a
t the post office and who was fifteen years younger than him, a widow, who had started quizzing him about the books he received. They started an exchange in this way. Every month, talking about books on her lunch hour. Trading stories.

  She’d been to his place only once and he made her a rabbit stew with wild onions and carrots he’d grown himself, browning the rabbit first in bacon grease and flavoring it finally with some of the sage that grew on his property. He’d been proud of it at the time. Though it was nothing special to him, it had made the woman very happy and they’d sat in front of the woodstove for an hour after to talk over books as they did on her lunch hour. Afterward he walked her out onto the small drive where she’d parked and for a moment he thought he would kiss her. But the moment passed and he regretted it deeply, knowing he had let something slip by that he could not replace.

  It was the woman he was thinking about as he came up out of the cottonwoods, the rabbit and two prairie dogs on a string over his shoulder. He wanted to cook her something and he was planning it out in his head as he walked. Stopping to catch his breath again, he leaned a hand to the porch railing and kicked the mud from his boots before going into his house.

  There was little light inside and he could see that the coals in the stove had burned themselves to white ash, almost dead except for a small pocket of red deep in the belly. He broke kindling and stoked the fire. Leaving the rabbit and prairie dogs in the sink to be skinned and washed in the next hour, he went out onto the porch and sat in a chair watching the way the road wound away from him over the rises of land. Grass everywhere turning from winter gray to something like gold.

  From inside his jacket he brought up a pack of cigarettes and shook one out. He put it to his lips and lit it, letting the smoke into his lungs and watching the world around him. It was nearly as cold in the house as outside and he pushed the lapels of his hunting coat up and pulled the collar close around his neck. Holding it there with one hand and smoking with the other.

  After a few minutes he went in to check on the stove, threw more wood on, and then came back outside. He liked to sit there in the morning and let the heat build inside the house as the dawn light spread through the sky. The two seeming linked in some cosmic way. He was smoking another cigarette when he saw the sheriff’s deputy car break over the far rise in the road and come down the long slope toward his house. It was a car he had seen a few times before and he only stirred slightly as it drew to a stop and the young man got out. The face older than Morgan remembered but still recognizable.

  PATRICK SAT FOR an hour in the old logging truck, watching the sun crest the mountains to the east. The lake fog everywhere in the trees and a haze of it floating like a slow river over the fenced-in asphalt parking lot. Through the night he’d kept himself warm with a wool blanket he’d found in the doghouse off the back of the truck’s cab. Too worried to climb up into the bunk, he’d sat watching the road through the windshield most of the night. The Silver Lake Sheriff’s Department cruiser going past twice while he sat there, and the unmarked Impala patrolling the streets like a shark through clouded water, feeling its way around.

  He hadn’t meant to run, but he had. The decision coming on him all at once, just like that, there for only an instant and then his feet moving, veering off the road into the forest, jumping thick stands of sword fern and dodging past tree trunks as he went into the darkness. The rich peat smell of the spring earth released with every step, soft and silent as his feet went. A good fifty yards gone by in only a matter of seconds before Patrick turned and watched a single golden flashlight beam spring up behind him.

  It was Gary who told him about Driscoll. Both Gary and Patrick waiting for Luke to leave before they could talk. Those two men dead all those years before outside Bellingham. Something terribly wrong about the whole thing, about how it had been handled by both Patrick and Gary. And the bleak promise for the future that had been left for Gary and Patrick when it was done.

  “You know he’ll never let it lie,” Gary was saying. The two of them in the Buck Blind sitting close over the last of their beers.

  “I know he won’t,” Patrick said. He’d already looked toward the door twice, and now he did it a third time, watching for movement, expecting any minute for Driscoll to come through that door and force Patrick’s face to the table as he had twelve years before. “I’d be disappointed if Driscoll gave up that easily. All this time he’s had his nut out for us.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Gary asked.

  “Those men had wives,” Patrick said. “They had children. It’s a hell of a legacy we left them.”

  Gary shook his head and looked off at the bar, where Jack was starting to clean up. “It was an accident,” Gary said. “I was all nerves. I didn’t mean to shoot them.”

  “I know you didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that it happened.”

  “He’s telling things to your kid.”

  “I know,” Patrick said.

  “Well,” Gary said, drawing the word out long before going on again, “what are we going to do about that?”

  “Christ, Gary,” Patrick whispered. “That isn’t on the table. He’s a fucking federal agent.”

  “I’ve shot bigger animals with my hunting rifle,” Gary said. He was grinning and he looked away at Jack where he stood clearing glasses from a far table. The logger who had been playing the music was long since gone from the bar. When his eyes came back to Patrick, Gary said, “It’s just a joke. I’d never suggest something like that. I was just asking the question.”

  “Good,” Patrick said. “I didn’t go away for twelve years just so I could go back in.”

  “He’s telling stuff to your kid, doesn’t that get under your skin? Doesn’t that piss you off?”

  “I know what he’s saying. I know all about it. I wouldn’t have left anything around to get Bobby in trouble and I wouldn’t do it now.”

  “You should tell that to Driscoll,” Gary said.

  “I’d say it to him and he’d go through Bobby’s place regardless.” Patrick laughed. “If there’s anyone I know after being gone for twelve years, it’s Driscoll. He came to see me every year. Like we had an anniversary.”

  “He’s a real sweet guy,” Gary said.

  The man had thought one thing about Patrick for twelve years and he’d been right. Patrick had stolen that drug money. Driscoll wasn’t going to give up just because Patrick said he didn’t do it.

  “Fuck,” Patrick said. He finished the last of the beer and sat waiting for something from the universe, anything, some sign to tell him what he should do. Nothing came and he looked over his shoulder at the bartender and watched the son of their old friend Bill bring the glasses behind the bar, then go back to the table and wipe the wood laminate down with a towel. They were the only ones left in the Buck Blind. “I’ll call you from the road,” Patrick said to Gary.

  “I can come with you.”

  Patrick made a watery circle on the table with the bottom of his glass. “How would that look? Twelve years away and I haven’t screwed you over. You think I’ll do it now?”

  “It’s a lot of money,” Gary said.

  “That’s about the only thing that got me through,” Patrick said. “My life’s already gone, Gary. I wish I could say it to you another way, but that’s it. All I’ll ever be has already come and gone. And now all there is is the money. It’s the only thing I can look forward to. You’ve still got your life.”

  “You’re going to run?”

  “Do the smart thing, Gary. Wait it out. The money will be there for you when you retire, just like it’s been there these last years. Nothing is going to change. You’ve still got a life here. I don’t have anything like that and I don’t see Driscoll giving up on me any time soon.”

  “You know that kid Jack over there?” Gary said, gesturing to the bartender. “He’s a good kid. You need me for anything you give the bar a call.”

  “He is Bill’s son,” Patrick said.

  “He is
that.” Gary tipped the last of his beer back, then waved to Jack for the total.

  Five minutes later they were standing outside the bar. No stars above in the sky and the moon visible only as a faint orb of white light behind the clouds. Rain coming. Down the street Patrick saw Driscoll’s Impala waiting for him in the shadows.

  Gary turned and followed Patrick’s gaze. “You don’t think Driscoll will ever give up, do you?”

  “I don’t think he has it in him,” Patrick said.

  They said their good-byes and when Patrick was halfway home, he went into the woods.

  The truth was that the life he’d led in Silver Lake was gone. It had disappeared the moment Patrick had tried to run twelve years before and Driscoll had been waiting for him, forcing his face down onto a restaurant table. Possibly the life Patrick had always wanted had disappeared even before, when he’d sat in the Seattle hospital listening to the machines pump life in and out of his wife. And it was sure enough gone as soon as he cut through the woods only hours before. Climbing the fence of the logging outfit and waiting inside the cab of the semi.

  Patrick saw, too, that his son and Sheri had done good with what was left to them. He could see that just as plainly as he could see his own situation. The land Patrick had shared with his wife was no longer his. It never would be again, never needed to be, and Patrick expected that his presence there would always be a reminder of what had once existed. What had once been his life there and what he had lost.

  With the set of keys he’d taken from the steel box at the end of the lot, Patrick started the logging truck. The sun now completely up over the mountains and a sheen of water from the night’s rain visible on the asphalt. No sight of a Silver Lake cruiser or Driscoll’s Impala for two or three hours. He shifted the gears until he had a feel for the big semi and then he moved out of the line, bringing the front of the truck around and aiming for the gate.