When You Run with Wolves

by Robert White

I called the same cab service from the pay phone outside the gas station and told the dispatcher where his cabbie could pick me up. I had a quarter-mile run from there to the Clay Street Inn where the cab would meet me. But I had no more than an hour to talk the driver into riding me free down to the beach. I still had to hope this person would be willing to forego common sense and wait while I scampered along the flat rocks another quarter mile to retrieve the money. For all I knew, some lucky fisherman had snagged the bag on his line fishing for sheepshead and carp. Then I had to get this cabbie to fly at breakneck speed to Marija’s cabin at Jefferson-on-the-Lake and hope that no cops or state troopers were passing the other way on shift change.

  For every minute late, the sodden note said, another part of Carlos would be deducted. It was full of misspellings and signed ‘Gess Hoo.’

  #36

  Luck takes different forms in life. Sometimes it’s the right people you meet at the right time, and then everything changes for the good. Sometimes it’s just you imposing your will in some kind of way that accords with quantum physics and the universe respects your decision. The driver they sent me was not only willing to forego common sense but he had left it behind in some previous incarnation. He was about twenty-five, had a light sheen on his forehead and tiny red spots from picking – a meth head chasing invisible crank bugs beneath the skin. Anyone halfway normal would have sped off and left me standing there. He had the outline of a skull tattooed on the back of his head; his hands bore the fine blue etching of each knuckle bone laid atop the skin of all his fingers. He drove wildly fast and passed cars down recklessly. He talked nonstop about his out-of-body meditation experiences and asked me, innocently, if I thought he was crazy.

  He pulled up so close to the breakwall that I thought his bumper was going to hit the green handrail to the aluminum steps the city had leaned against it. Waves were pounding the other side of the wall and a plume of water hit the hood of his cab.

  “Fucking sand,” he glowed. “I love this shit.”

  “Here’s half the money, as promised,” I said. “The other half when I get back.”

  He stared straight ahead at the massive rocks, apparently caught up in some memory of sand doing something to him somewhere. I took the heavy aluminum steps two at a time and raced down the rocks toward the stubby lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor.

  There wasn’t a fisherman to be seen because of the chop. That was all the luck I was going to have. What appeared from my backyard to be a dun-colored arrow of round boulders was a broken, uneven surface slickened to ice by the crashing waves and strewn with puddles of algae-covered slime.

  I ran like a badly intoxicated drunk taking a field sobriety test blindfolded. The gaps between the rocks were impossible to negotiate at one speed – run too fast and I’d stumble headfirst over the side, hit a patch of seaweed and the result would be a pratfall that would crack my skull open like a rotten melon. I aimed for the lighthouse and tried to keep my footsteps on course, but I was soon flailing my arms and my head was bouncing on the stem of my neck like a Barbie doll as the rocks slipped out from under me.

  The exact configuration where I stashed the bag was a memory imprint from the time I put it inside the fissure. I love angles, and every combination of the granite shapes was unique. I ran on harder, getting better footing and fought off the chill creeping up my spine that said I wouldn’t recognize it in this half-crazed condition. I’d be that guy in the book of fairy tales who couldn’t remember which tree he buried the gold under.

  The one thing I hadn’t factored in was the seven-foot waves rolling in from the northwest fetch. The bag was waterproof but I wasn’t. I had to climb halfway down to get to the crack; the waves came fast in intervals like the flank of a charging battalion. I was already soaked from the spray hitting me as I ran. Now I had to time it so that I could reach my entire arm inside the pocket. The lower portion of the rocks on the lakeside was normally exposed to the lake’s invisible progress toward Niagara Falls. The ebb of the withdrawing waves left the lower rocks exposed down to their mantle of green seaweed.

  The trick was to get my body down there and flatten myself before the first wave hit. Then I had to stick my arm through the crevice and find the bag with my fingers. If I didn’t pull it out in time, the incoming water might knock me from my perch, and then I’d be scrabbling about fully clothed in the surf. I would have to take at least one breaking wave over my body and get out of there before the next one caught me. I would be underwater for part of this.

  My mind locked on to it exactly as it had during my trek down the wall yesterday afternoon. It was fifty yards off from the spot. Just as I reached the rock where I had to make my first move, a big comber rolled in and showered me with a pelting spray. It was like someone standing in front of me and hurling a bucket of water into my face.

  By the time I cleared my eyes the next wave, not as high, was already cresting on its heels. Churned up water spread all the way to the black horizon and boiled up from an inky base of clouds that dipped down to touch the water. My courage evaporated like smoke while I stood there letting the seconds pass; my legs remained bolted to the granite surface. I cursed my father’s bones. Not a scintilla of light or hope was possible in this surreal disaster. When I was young, even in the worst of it, I still clung to the hope that I was going to have a real life despite my father’s dementia – it poked up like a blade of grass through cement no matter how depressing things were getting at home.

  “God damn you motherfuckers,” I said to the waves, but I meant everybody: my sick father, my twisted brother, my faithless wife, and that pair of amoral sexual degenerates who picked me out of a city directory like God pointing his finger at one luckless pismire whose day of wrath was at hand. I wanted the water to knock me off the wall and drown me. I had hit bottom and stood with a dumb bovine look on my face, if anybody cared to see it, just standing there inert gaping at a black sky. The water surged back and forth, in and out, back and forth, elements copulating, making geysers all around my half-frozen legs.

  “Fuck it,” I said. I scrambled down like a water spider before the next wave swept in. I found toeholds and handholds among the crevices. I flattened myself as well as possible and let the onrushing mass of water pound me in a frothy surf. I was completely soaked and shocked by the cold. The bathwater temperatures of summer were gone, and I felt the chill into the marrow of my bones. I reached into the hole and thrashed my arm through the foamy backwash. Nothing. I was taking too long – another wave was due. I pulled back just in time and reclaimed my position before the next wave smacked me somewhere around the kidneys and almost pried me loose.

  While I was still underwater, I thrust my arm into the hole again and this time I touched fabric. My fingers slipped around on it and I had enough of it to dislodge when a wave unexpectedly took me with twice the force of the last one. I was lifted like a mother cat picking up a kitten by the nape. This time there was no holding on to the rocks and the bag was too heavy to manage in the crashing surf. My body loosened, slipped, and then I was rolling in the water. It had the force of a rip tide and pulled me back into the lake away from the rocks.

  I was treading water anchored to a bag of money about ten yards from where I had gone in. I turned my head in time to see the curl right over me and dove down to avoid it. The bag was so cumbersome I didn’t get far under before the wave broke over my back. The surf this close was so wild and full of rogue waves and backflow from the rocks that the air I tried to breathe was saturated with flying water.

  I turned over and floated on my back, dragging my boat anchor, and kicked as hard as I could in my sodden clothes. I made little progress and could see nothing but foamy water and feel the undulations carrying me every way but toward the rocks.

  My strength was expended just to maintain my head above the water and my scissoring legs starting to go lower and lower into the heavy tide. My lungs burned. I knew I had to let go of the money to save my life...


  A big wave took me down beneath the surface, and I felt the blackness slip around my vision and replace the dirty green murk. I was becoming light-headed. I had a thought of letting go but something appeared at the periphery of my vision – or maybe I was seeing something caused by the changing blood pressure in my head. I saw foamy white ribbons, small vortexes like tiny tornadoes against the black. I swam for them.

  My body went into the rocks and I felt the shock in my hip through the churning water. I gulped a mouthful of the brackish water when my head cleared the surface. The next wave vaulted me higher and I was able to get a purchase with my one hand on the slimy rocks. I hung there resting until I had enough strength and air to climb higher. My soaked clothes and shoes weighed me down.

  The gods who love a joke didn’t want it to end here, however. As soon as I was able to roll over and vomit out some of the brackish water, I spotted the backpack jammed into the rocks just feet from where I had climbed up; it lay tucked into the surf like an abandoned baby seal with water breaking all around it and bubbling up from the cracks. I cupped my fingers like a rock climber and lowered myself down to it. One wrong move over the seaweed-covered rocks and the mocking gods would send me down a greased chute back into the water.

  I eased it from the crevice where it had lodged tight into a gap between the rocks. The backpack felt heavier than bricks. My shoulders and legs and side all ached. I staggered, walked, tripped and ran back the way I had come. My watch said I had chewed up eight of the forty-three minutes left before pieces of Carlos started coming off. I felt as if I had been in the water for an hour.

  My mind bumped along down the breakwall with my uncooperative body. Nothing made sense, not the elixir of sex and sadism that fed Calderone and Marija. I couldn’t picture any human being chopping up another like hacking through a row of cabbages. I sloshed water with every step and sucked air. My father’s mocking voice came rushing back like the tinnitus in my ears and the blood finding its equilibrium in my veins: Man is a wolf to man.

  #37

  Bones, my new cabbie’s street name, made it by eleven seconds. I stepped out of the cab in front of Marija’s cabin, my old peeping-tom haunt, and walked down the middle of the gravel drive. No one was in sight. No tourists and all the businesses seemed rolled up for the season. I saw the shop where Marija had first flirted with me a month and a lifetime ago.

  The last cabin on the right was the manager’s. I skirted close enough to the window to see a bearded man dozing in a chair behind a desk. He was the one who had looked at me dropping the rope with the bags over the edge.

  I pushed the door in, half-expecting to die in a hail of bullets or to see Calderone slavering, a machete in his fist. Marija sat on a corner of the bed with her hands folded demurely in her lap. She wore something with sequins and frilly at the neck that reminded me of those ornate Elizabethan neck ruffs. She looked dressed for church.

  “Well done, Jack,” she said and checked a thin gold watch on her wrist. “Right on the dot. Your brother’s children will thank you someday for allowing him to keep his balls.”

  “Why doesn’t it surprise me that you’d start with those?”

  She smoothed her skirt. “You might have picked a better time to go swimming.”

  “Where’s my brother?”

  “He’s in the back with Randall,” she said. She hiked a leg over a knee and gave me one of those smiles that had lured me in like so many other gullible fish. But it wasn’t the smile I knew; this one was different, and that difference told me everything.

  “Tell him to come out, I want to see him,” I said.

  “The money first,” she said. The smile flickered a little brighter but died faster.

  I dropped the backpack down at her feet. “It’s mostly all there,” I said. “I used some for cab fare the last couple of days.”

  “How much?”

  “About five thousand.”

  “Generous, aren’t you?” She didn’t make a move from the bed to check it.

  “I believe in tipping the working people.”

  “Randall would say that’s mighty white of you,” she simpered. Despite the effort, she gave off fear in waves. She was in terror – not of me but of betraying him.

  “What are we waiting for? Let’s do this,” I said.

  “I forgot to mention one little detail back at the bar,” she said and shifted her butt on the bed.

  “Tell me,” I said. The adrenalin was practically levitating me off the floor. Then I heard a muffled voice in the back room telling Carl to shut up, he’d be free in a minute.

  “You’re part of this, Jack. The money and you for your brother,” she said. She had the gun out from beneath her lap and was pointing it at my stomach.

  “I want to see my brother, Marija. Call it a request,” I said.

  “Turn around and lift up your shirt all the way. Do it. Or I will shoot you in the guts.”

  I turned around with my hands raised to my shoulders.

  “Unzip the bag. If there’s anything in there but money, you’ll be begging me to kill you.”

  I kneeled down, a supplicant approaching Shiva with an offering. I unzipped it and held it open by the edges for her to see inside. “All there but my generous tip,” I said.

  I was staring at her, and though the gun was pointing at my chin, she cast her eyes down once, briefly, drawn by the money or to avoid acknowledging the look in my eyes that said I knew she was scamming me and that my brother was most likely dead.

  “Get away from the bag,” she said.

  “I just want you to see it’s all there. Look for yourself,” I said.

  She wasn’t close enough yet.

  “You know he’s going to rip your fucking heart out,” I said quietly.

  She reacted to that by thrusting her free hand within range of the bag and when she did that I made my move with the concealed machete knife. The confident look on her face was still there as I rocked back on my heels as if I were frightened by the gun so close to my face. The short arc of my swing got a little torque with my hips, like a hard right hand punch to the liver – a finishing punch. The heavy blade snicked through the wrist bone but didn’t sever. I cut through enough tendons to make that hand useless, but the gun in her good hand was the problem. The shock of what I did was more than enough to trip the three pounds of pressure she needed to squeeze off a round. The bullet missed me by a country mile.

  I had her gun hand clenched hard in my fist. A spouting artery showered us with blood. I had my whole body on top of her and with my knife, held up only by her slapping, weakened efforts, I could easily have slit her throat. Her eyes rolled around as she tried to make sense of what was happening. I gripped the wet stump of her wrist so hard I must have stanched some of the blood flow, but her whole arm was slick with it. By the time she stopped writhing beneath me, we were both covered. It spattered everything – the bedspread, me, and dotted her face with silly red freckles.

  “What you- What you always wanted, Jack,” she said and gave me a sick smile. Her eyes rolled back completely and I felt her body go limp in a dead faint.

  I got up slowly, not willing to take my eyes off her. Her arm hung off the side of the small bed and the ragged claw of her hand kept bleeding out into a puddle. Her breasts lay flattened against her chest and puffed out the fabric at the sides. I cut a section of blouse and tore it to make a tourniquet. Her skin was rapidly fading from bronzed to translucent. I didn’t need to tie her up.

  The gun rested against the wall. I recognized it as one of the 9 mms from the pile on the table in the farmhouse. I was afraid she’d bleed to death while I looked in the other room.

  It was silent. I suppose that was what first told me Calderone was nowhere around this cabin. Old habit took over, I assumed the Weaver stance the old man always insisted on. Adrenalin was choking me and a vein pounded in my neck.

  I lowered the gun and stuck it in my pocket. I went in low and made out a dark shape on the floor. Next to i
t was a cheap boxy-looking tape recorder from decades before computer chips were invented; it was still in the play position.

  The shape, of course, was my brother.

  It wasn’t possible to tell right away because of the dim lighting and the blankets thrown over the window opposite the bed. He lay on a rubber mat, but he had been dissected elsewhere. There wasn’t much blood and the coppery smell was too faint. They had done a lot of damage to his head first. The bruises were fresh, livid, but the blood had dried and oxidized to a rusty brown. The smeary blue iris of eyeballs. His torso was swathed in a bloody rag, which I realized was a dress with some kind of print. The other parts of him were stacked together: legs, arms, hands, genitalia, feet – parts for assembling a doll-man. I touched his blanched, empty face and tried to stroke his hair, but my hand was shaking too hard.

  What had made him want to crawl back to Calderone? Had my father so destroyed him that he knew nothing else but to hide beneath the wing of a monster? I was no shrink, but I was guilty for this horror. When he needed me, I abandoned him. I never saw how broken he was in his mind.

  When I came back into the room for her, she was gone. The bed was rumpled, bloody, and a yard-wide viscid trail of crimson showed me the way she fled as obviously as neon signs. Bloody and maimed, she had still hauled off with the backpack. I almost admired her.

  I picked up my machete knife and went looking. The blood led across the porch and over the gravel road to the manager’s cabin. The splatters of blood were huge red comet tails. I stuck the gun in my pants.

  The manager never moved in his chair when I kicked his door. Walking past his unmoving form, I understood why: he had received the same treatment as Stevie. A splotch of dark gore and drying blood created a grim rosette on the wall. I didn’t see it when I walked past him outside.

  I followed the blood down his hallway and out the back door. She dropped the bag at that point because the ground was disturbed off the back steps where she must have stumbled. The drops were fewer but so plentiful that a blind man could track her. I was unaware of anything around me. Her steps showed her backtracking, wasting time and what strength she had left.