When You Run with Wolves

by Robert White

  Sounds became words and words became recognizable. Then bodies shifted on the bed, rustling sounds, and then slight slap of skin.

  My consciousness was hearing Sarah’s voice urge her demon lover on with words I knew – go deeper, fuck harder, fuck me, fuck me – and then cries of animal lust: oh, that’s good, yes, yes, yes-

  Whore, bitch.

  I turned the corner and beheld them on the bed. Calderone was behind her pumping with his hands locked on her hips. His body dwarfed hers except for the rocking motion of the dirty bottoms of her feet sticking out from his thighs. Sweat rolled down his back. Fuck me, fuck me in the ass – oh, like that, like that, like that...

  I was hallucinating, hearing the ghost in the machine, she was Marija, then she became herself again-

  I walked right up to him and raised the knife. I lowered it. I was a foot from his neck. The commotion on the bed was building up and she was moaning even louder now for his cock, begging him to stick it all the way up her, harder, get his balls inside her if he could...

  This is not going to sound like truth, but the next thing I remember was seeing the knife handle quivering in his back. He howled. He disengaged from her, but his erection had not gone flaccid. He tried to reach for the knife but it was too far down below his shoulder blade and stuck deep. When he turned to see who it was who had done this incredible thing to him, he roared and reached for my neck; he jerked me off the floor and flung me backward like a rag doll. He was on top of me throwing punches that flailed and missed my head and cracked the floor. He reared up with his hands locked into a single wrecking ball and brought them down on my chest. I thought my clavicle bone snapped. I almost blacked out from the pain.

  Sarah hit him at a dead run from behind and rode his shoulders; she was screaming gibberish and biting his ear like an animal. With one hand, he pulled her by the hair down to his shoulder and threw an uppercut into her face – a straw-weight female taking on a super heavyweight. I was still stunned and lying helpless on the ground expecting any second for him to resume his pounding.

  “Run!” I yelled.

  Calderone’s fist knocked my head sideways. My right eye swelled up and closed immediately. He drew his arm back for another punch but she hit him again just enough with her body to tilt his weight; he went down with her fingers gouging for his eyes in frenzy. Now there were two of us fighting him as well as a knife sticking in his back.

  I threw a punch from the floor that didn’t have much on it and sent an electric shock running up my arm. He turned back to face me. Sarah was a raging Furie, blood streaming down her face, fingers curled like talons aimed to rake Calderone’s face. He fired shots that were glancing blows that hurt his hands more than my head. Sarah, free to move, had scooped up a lamp and was about to bring it down on the back of his head. That was enough to turn him toward her. I slid out from under his bulk while she distracted him with feints. Now we were at opposite ends, I was facing Calderone, negating his one-on-one power. Even his brute strength couldn’t take us both down together in a heap.

  “You fucker, I’ll kill you!” Sarah screamed and lunged with the lamp.

  “Sarah, no,” I croaked. “Get... the Angel.”

  “What do you think you’re gonna do, pussy,” he sneered and drew himself up to size, relaxed, nimble on his feet again.

  “You heard her. We... we’re going to kill you, fucker,” I said.

  Calderone couldn’t believe my audacity; he knew he was more than a match for four of us. But there was a hesitation in his voice, not so sure.

  He did what I expected and came at me in a rush, a bull with a picador’s shaft stuck in him. He slammed me backwards but I kept my feet moving at his speed and stayed upright as we hit the door. He threw a haymaker that would have finished me if I had stayed to receive it. Even with my bad eyes, I saw his telegraphed punches. Calderone was a bully, a street fighter, one of those loud shirt-ripping thugs who dominated by size. I threw a jab into his teeth that split open his lip. He roared and came at me again. I stepped sideways and hit him hard in the jaw with a right cross and a left to the kidneys – something I had done to my basement punching bag ten thousand times. Now I saw something else in his eyes: fear. It was a shot of adrenalin to my heart and I knew it wasn’t going to be so big a mismatch, after all.

  Meanwhile Sarah had armed herself with the Guardian Angel and was coming at him from behind. Time slowed to a glacier pace as I watched the clenched line of her jaw and the stringy sinews of her bicep as she slammed it into his back. Calderone wasn’t fazed by the pain, but he was like a pit bull in a fighting ring snapping at everything that came close. He whipped a backhand out that connected with her arms and swept her aside like a cat swatting at a dust mote.

  It was all the chance I might get if she was out of the fight. I lunged for the knife as I had once flung my whole body at Carlos’ speeding car. I had both hands on the handle as I flew into him. I found leverage for a thrust just before his enormous strength bucked me off. Our legs tangled and we went down as he tried to twist away from the pain. He was losing his insane fury. It was a self-consuming fuel, useless to him. I was still holding on to the knife that was severing its way through his muscle. I kept twisting and leaning into it. Somehow, in a burst of strength from his big body, he shook me loose.

  He staggered back to the window to take his bearings but flinging out his hand smashed the window and sliced open a cut that was deep and bled profusely. This was serious and he knew it. I could read his mind; the tide of battle had turned and he was going to need a gun to restore the balance he lost. He looked at me, bared his teeth, but said nothing. I held the knife in front of me and waited for the charge.

  Calderone’s chest was heaving hard. His face was a grim mask of pain. He had not expected any resistance, let alone a furious assault by a husband and wife he had dominated so easily. I was panting, too, but calm and a sense of control gave me legs to keep fighting. More than anything else, I knew I could not let him get to the guns he had stashed.

  He lunged toward me, elbow up like a linebacker, in a feint that tried to bump me out of his way as he planted his foot and drove off it to my right. The old man’s words never failed: attack the man, not the weapon. I switched the knife to my right hand and slashed out with it just as he drove past me toward the doorway.

  I turned and watched him slam into the door and bounce off it. He slapped a hand on to the red geyser spouting from his neck. He was out of sight in a second and running fast down the stairs.

  I went over to Sarah and checked her pulse. She opened her eyes at my touch and started to fight me until she recognized me. Her nose was swollen and her eyes were tiny slits like a cat waking up.

  “W-where is he? Jack, where did he go?”

  “Easy,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “What are you saying? We have to call the police!”

  “Look,” I said and pointed at the floor where the door and ceiling had been spattered. She looked where I pointed at a small puddle of it.

  “Blood,” she said dully.

  “His carotid.”

  “Help me up,” she said.

  “I’m going to finish it. He’s not going to last more than a few minutes.”

  I didn’t wait for her. I didn’t think Calderone would have the skills to cinch off a spouting artery. While my mind was still clear, I was going to have to do it now or call the cops.

  He was sitting in the kitchen slumped to the floor holding part of a cloth shirt to the gaping slash in his neck. It wasn’t enough to stop him from bleeding out. The pools of red from the downstairs landing to the kitchen where he sat soaked in it looked like a red archipelago of islands linked by atolls and tidal reefs on a geological map. He looked up at me while his breath whistled through his teeth.

  I looked down at him and tapped the knife against my leg. “Don’t waste your breath cursing me out,” I said. I was shaking too hard to use the knife. I went out the door to the porch and gr
abbed hold of the bamboo chair to keep from collapsing. When I was steady enough, I went outside. The sun and the air almost induced a spasm of vomiting. I was wrapped in a stink of my own feral odor making me sicker. I walked down the driveway to the red stain, now a rusty brown patch in the grass. Ants were feasting on the dried stain in the driveway. I picked up the bat.

  Hammerin’ Hank Aaron. An old faded model with divots at the meat end and a big dent where some brown hairs had stuck to the splinters.

  I walked back to the house dragging it through the grass.

  Randall Calderone, Aryan Brother, convict and sometime skinhead, sat against the wall where I had left him. The gash in his hand was still leaking blood with his pumping heart, which was his real enemy now. His eyes were glazed like the eyes of a dying bird.

  “Look at me,” I said.

  “Call... call ambulance,” he said and coughed. He stared at me through glazed eyes in which the pupils were disappearing into the black.

  “Look at me,” I said. “This is for Carlos.”

  I swung the bat in a chopping downward stroke that connected with his head just above the right eye. It didn’t break through the skull bone but it split the skin open. He said something that sounded like “Ugh,” but he didn’t move or try to ward off a blow.

  “This is for Sarah,” I said and swung again. The crunch of skull was like a pistol shot.

  “This is for me,” I said and brought the bat down a third time. His bowels evacuated.

  Whatever Calderone was in life, he had vacated the premises. I stepped back and focused on the spot where the skull cap is weakest and drew the bat back over my shoulder for another swing. This time the crunch was sufficient to tell me I had shattered more skull cap and bounced his brain around inside it.

  It was like hitting a tree with an axe where the stroke isn’t smooth and you get that ringing sensation clear to your elbow. The force knocked him sideways across the kitchen and he sprawled out like a body dumped from a moving car. His legs were crossed at the ankles and his arms extended out. I watched the blood flowing down his neck slow to a trickle and then the leak stopped altogether.

  “Jack.”

  I turned to see Sarah staring at me. I didn’t know how long she had been there.

  “Jack,” she said.

  I held out my arms to her, but she pulled her bathrobe tighter across her and turned around. I watched her walk away and heard her go up the stairs. A few minutes later I heard the sirens screaming.

  #41

  I didn’t know it then, but that would be the last time I would see my wife except for one other time when she came to court to testify at my trial. I don’t count the two times she came to see me down in Orient at the Correctional Reception Center prior to my sentencing. I waited there in a holding pen for three months before transferring to the Ross Correctional Institute in Chillicothe at the southern end of the state. The guards were local, spoke with an accent, not like the flat Northern speech I was used to hearing since I had left Canada. Most were dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, believed in a mighty, wrathful God, and bragged about their sons and daughters who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan. When one of them came home in a silver casket, they would all line the streets waving tiny flags.

  Several white buses were lined up the day we transferred from Columbus to take us to Lucasville, Mansfield, and Youngstown. Most of the men I rode with had done time before or were demoted back to maximum facilities for infractions in their medium-security prisons.

  I remember the man next to me had body odor, how my breath steamed up the windows of the bus. It was a gray, cold day of icy sleet in late November. I was grateful the day was so bleak. It would have been much harder if the sun had been shining.

  I still wake up from a bad dream once in a while. Mostly these are dreams where I’m suffocating – trapped in pipes or sewer drains. Like last night. I found myself trapped inside a tree – I was running from another one of those downpours that turned into a hail storm. Then a thunderstorm rolled in and lightning struck the ground everywhere. I climbed inside a hollowed-out tree and got stuck at the very moment I knew lightning would hit it. I worked my body past a family of possums so I wouldn’t hurt them, and that’s when I got good and stuck. I knew that fifty thousand volts would boil the sap so that the tree bark would explode. I could see my own pink viscera being blown outwards through the slits in the bark – it’s like being instantly spaghettified by falling into the black hole of a collapsed star. In my disembodied mind, floating around like a green firefly, I see particles of guts like popcorn lying scattered across the ground. Then I see the wristwatch Sarah had given me, all dented and melted from the hot blast. I wake up with the aria of a scream still climbing out of my throat.

  But everybody has dreams like that, right?

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  About the Author

  Robb White is the author of two hardboiled private-eye novels featuring his existentialist detective Thomas Haftmann, both published by Grand Mal Press: Haftmann’s Rules (2011) and Saraband for a Runaway (2013). His crime novel Special Collections was the winner of the 2014 Electronic Book Series Competition by New Rivers Press. “Frotteur in the Dark” was selected by 10,000 Tons of Black Ink as one of 6 Best Of for 2009. That story was published in the collection “Out of Breath” and Other Stories by Red Giant Press of Cleveland in 2013. White also writes book reviews and does interviews for Tom Huff’s magazine Boxing World.

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  About Number Thirteen Press

  Pulp

  Crime

  Novellas

  Number Thirteen Press is building a list of 13 quality crime novellas and short novels, to be published consecutively on the 13th of each month, from November 2014 to November 2015.

  For all the latest info and to sign up for the newsletter, or for details about all 13 releases, go to www.numberthirteenpress.com

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  Number Thirteen Press

  #1 Of Blondes and Bullets – Michael Young

  #2 Down Among the Dead – Steve Finbow

  #3 The Mistake – Grant Nicol

  #4 – When You Run with Wolves – Robert White

  #5 – tba

  www.numberthirteenpress.com

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