by Maria Vale
“Silver is as good a wolf as any in this Pack,” John says, scratching behind Lana’s ear. “But going Offland requires her to be a convincing human.”
“I can do it, John. Ti’s been very helpful, and I’ll even do that online human behaviors course Leonora’s always—”
“A man notices a wolf sitting next to him at the movie theater,” John interrupts.
“Ouu. I love this one.”
“I know you do, Silver. But maybe Tiberius doesn’t know it? So…a man sees a wolf sitting next to him at the movie theater. And the guy says to the wolf, ‘What are you doing here?’ The wolf shrugs and says, ‘Well, I liked the book.’”
And I laugh and laugh and laugh.
John looks at Ti before gently pushing my upper lip down to cover my teeth, the ones that are too long and too sharp and too feral ever to be mistaken for human.
The screen door bangs in the cabin next door, and Paula calls for her daughter. John waves to her, pointing to Lana.
“I wish I could hold on to them all,” he says, stroking the pup nestled in his arms. “But you’re right, I can’t. Silver, tell Tara that you two will be making the town run on Wednesday. She’ll get you an ID and give you the list. Then, Silver, come see me in my office. There are some things I need to go over. And, Tiberius, this is on you. If something happens to her, know that we will hunt you down.”
Lana squirms as John passes her to Paula. The retreating pup stares at him over her mother’s shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” says Ti. “If something happens to her, you won’t have to hunt me down, because I will already be dead.”
* * *
I tell Tara that I’m going into the City, and she says Plattsburgh isn’t the City. I tell Gran Tito that I’m going into the City, and he says Plattsburgh isn’t the City. Even Leelee has the gall to tell me that Plattsburgh isn’t the City.
“Can you drive a stick?” Tara asks Ti, her hand floating over a shallow box of keys.
He motions with one hand, one eyebrow up, which must mean something to Tara, because she throws him a key. “The red Wrangler.”
John and Leonora both gave me careful instructions about dealing with humans, trying to explain the balance between interacting with the community and keeping it at arm’s length.
I check three times to make sure I have the list and the cash and the prepaid card and the map of Plattsburgh. I plot out the places we need to go: the post office, the Corner-Stone bookstore, the True Value, Hannaford. We also have to go to Tails of the Adirondacks, because the pups have hidden all the cheese chews and we need more peanut butter toothpaste. Last minute, Tara tells me to get another gallon of Skunk-Off. “I don’t know what the pups are up to, but we’re going through it like water, and the skunks won’t be dormant for two more moons.”
Tara says if we need lunch, we should go to Himalaya, because the other restaurants serve mostly carrion.
In the Wrangler, Ti puts on a leash. This is a man who tore his throat raw trying to get out of a collar, but he voluntarily puts on a leash.
“You have to put yours on too,” he says.
As if.
“It’s the law, Sil.”
“I don’t care what any stupid leash law says, I’m not wearing it.”
“It’s not a leash; it’s a seat belt. Protects you from accidents, and if you don’t wear it, we will be stopped.”
“Oh.”
“That’s right, ‘oh.’” He starts jostling down the rough road leading from the Great Hall. At the gate, I tell Gabriel that we’re going to the City.
“So I’ve heard. Yay, Plattsburgh,” he says and gives me a fist bump.
It’s a slow trip down our rough access road. We wobble and bump, and stones spit against the bottom of the car.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were John’s niece?”
“It’s not like it means anything. All that matters is Pack.”
At the end of the road, we make a right-hand turn and we’re on the human road, made entirely of crushed stone glued tightly together. It’s very smooth and Ti starts going faster and when I push the button, the window comes down and a thousand scents flood my nose and the wind whips my hair every which way.
“How did your parents die, exactly?”
“No one knows exactly,” I say to the wind. “They stopped on the road, probably something to do with the pregnancy because they had changed. Someone with a gun saw them. My mother was shot in the head and died instantly. My father was shot in the chest. He managed to rip me and my two brothers out and then ran. He was dead when the hunters caught up with him, and by the time the Pack tracked us, my brothers were dead too.”
We turn onto another road that has space for two cars going in opposite directions, and Ti goes even faster.
“You told me your parents passed. That is not passing.”
“It is if you’re a wolf.”
I love the wind on my face and the smells that keep coming faster and faster. Mink and bog and granite and cedar and roadkillandbalsamandporcupineandhoneyfungusand—
“Wildfire,” he says, reaching across to my hand, “keep your head in the car.”
And I wrap my fingers in his and smile because my lungs are full, my heart is full, and the wind is beating against my skin, and I’m going so much faster than I could ever run.
Chapter 18
One of the things that Leonora failed to tell us about Offland is that movies add like a solid foot to humans. It turns out that among the humans of Plattsburgh, at least, five foot nine isn’t all that runty.
At Hannaford, Ti leaves me in the checkitout line with our cart so that he can run back and get the coffee that I didn’t pick up. I was moving down the aisle, looking for the right brand, when I was absolutely socked by the overwhelming smell of carrion. By the time Ti found me staring terrified at the cases filled with watery pink slabs of rotting flesh, I’d completely forgotten about the coffee.
“Stay here, Sil,” he says. “I’ll be right back. Just keep moving the cart in the line and don’t do”—he looks around briefly before adding—“anything.” He draws two fingers down my upper lip to remind me about my teeth.
But then a woman tries to maneuver a cart filled with three children and food down the aisle behind me, and because it has a balky wheel, it gets jammed behind a display of hand sanitizer. No matter how much she pushes and pulls, the cart won’t move. She doesn’t seem to understand that it needs to be lifted. There is a man behind me in a Patriots sweatshirt who is mumbling something about Bill Belichick. I tell him I’ll be right back.
“What? No, hold on, Frank. What did you say?”
“Frank? My name’s Silver, actually. And this is my cart. I’ll be right back.”
He rolls his eyes.
“You need to lift it,” I say to the woman, but she doesn’t seem to understand, so I just do it myself, hoping that she won’t be angry and think I meant to expose her weakness.
She opens her mouth and closes it, but no sound comes out. Humans are always talking, so this naturally worries me. I make conversation, like Leonora told me I should to put humans at ease. I ask if the three children in the cart are all hers. She nods slowly, and I congratulate her on her fertility and on surviving so many live births.
The littlest kid who is seated up front starts to cry, and the mother takes him out and glowers at me. One of the kids in the back says I’m very strong for a grandma. He is small, so I explain to him that I am 270 moons and it will be many, many moons before I breed. If ever. A lot of people stare, and it’s not friendly, and I suddenly feel very self-conscious about my hair. I tuck it under my hoodie and suck my lips tighter over my teeth.
Someone pushed our cart out of line. The man in the Patriots sweatshirt is now almost at the front.
I’d told the man in the Patriots sweatshirt that I’d be
right back, I explain when Ti tumbles his armload of vacuum-packed coffee bricks into the cart that is at the back of the checkitout line again. “He probably figured he could move our cart, what with me being a subordinate and all.”
The man, who has already put his groceries on the counter, keeps talking and laughing, though his laughter fades as his eyes wander from me to Ti, whose massive arms are folded in front of his chest. The man grabs at his groceries and stumbles away, oranges dropping to the floor. Not that Ti has done anything. Just stared through him with those hard eyes.
I put a box on the conveyor belt that moves it from point A to point A plus two feet. The lady rubs it over a window until it chirps. I put another box on the conveyor belt and watch it proceed on its strange little pilgrimage. The lady’s eyebrows shoot up.
Someone behind us coughs irritably, and Ti starts cramming things willy-nilly on the conveyor belt, and they all crowd to the lady, who no longer has time to do anything with her eyebrows. A boy at the end tries to put things into plastic bags, but I open up the old firewood bags we use instead. We get enough of other people’s plastic bags flying around, and it makes John angry when they get stuck in our trees. A few years back, one got tangled around Tilly’s neck, and she ran terrified through the woods with this white bag that said…
Thank you
Thank you
Thank you
Thank you
…flapping around her head until a posse of Pack finally corralled her and got it off. I worried for nearly a moon about why someone would demonstrate gratitude in such a blatantly cruel way until one of the older wolves explained.
I toss one bag over each shoulder, take one in each hand. Ti slides a plastic card back into his pocket and then takes the other four.
I’m starting to feel less and less comfortable, feeling like for all the reading I’ve done, I don’t really understand this world, and at Tails of the Adirondacks, I forget myself and suggest that twelve dollars is a lot to pay for a guinea pig that seems to have a lot of fur and very little meat. I stumble over the answer to why we need a gross of cheese chews and twenty-four tubes of peanut butter toothpaste. “Because the chicken toothpaste tastes disgusting.”
“What she means is that the dogs prefer the peanut butter. We breed dogs,” Ti says. “Huskies and Northern Inuits.”
I know it’s what John wants us to say, but I can’t get my mouth to form the sounds. Our pups don’t like carrion toothpaste. Our children like peanut butter.
I’m not hungry; I just want to go home, but we have one last stop. We get stuck waiting while huge machines tear up the earth with massive claws that rip through the roots of trees. NEW MUN•PAL •ARKING LOT OPENI•G SOON, says the bullet-riddled sign.
At our final stop, Ti pumps gas while I take my list into the station. The boss is a tall, lanky young man with lots of pimples, straight-cut bangs, and a blue polo shirt. He wears a red and white hat with a grease-stained bill that says Utica Club on it.
He seems nicer than most and helps me find the remaining things on our list. I’ve got two cans of oil, a compressor belt, an air filter, and a sealed beam headlight.
“Never seen a girl color up her hair all white ’n’ gray.”
“Didn’t color it. It just comes this way.”
“Can I touch it?” he says, his hand raised.
Now, honestly, if he wants to cover me, he should just say so. Though he’s got Omega written all over him. I wish Ti would hurry up.
The boss puts his hand in my hair. “You’re real pretty,” he says quietly.
“I see that you have an erection,” I say, trying to sound sympathetic. “But I feel I should tell you that you would probably have to fight him”—I point out the window—“if you want to cover me.”
Ti sees me and mouths, You okay? I wave back.
The boss looks at me and then at Ti and, with his mouth still gaping, lurches toward the back office. I’m guessing he hadn’t anticipated that a runt like me would have a bedfellow like Ti.
Not a minute later, a man in a red button-down shirt, camouflage jacket, and blue jeans belted high around his waist comes out of the same office.
“That your car?”
“The red one? Uhh, yes?”
“You up there with John Torrance?”
“Yes, I’m John’s niece,” I say, remembering what John told me about blood being more important to humans than Pack.
“And him?” He points to where Ti just hung up the gas nozzle. “He with you?”
“He’s my bedfellow.” John told me that if anyone asks, Ti is my boyfriend. Not bedfellow. Boyfriend. But I can’t do it. It’s like the thing about dogs. Some words feel wrong on my tongue. Ti is no boy, and he’s not a friend either. A friend doesn’t make me feel like climbing him, my legs tied around his hips, until he thickens and swells into my mazy spaces.
The man in the camouflage jacket sucks on his back teeth with a sharp sluck.
“What the hell goes on up there?”
“We are a group of like-minded individuals”—this time, except for one little fumble, I recite John’s instructions exactly—“who seek to live in harmony with nature and our fellow Pack…man.” There was another word he told me, but I’ve forgotten what it was. I leave out the dog part.
“Hippies?”
“Hippies. That’s it.”
“Where’d your ‘bedfellow’ go?”
I look toward the deserted car. “I’m guessing the bathroom.”
There are a lot of irritating noises here. The flickering lights overhead. The refrigerators. The countertop oven with wrinkled carrion sticks circling endlessly on metal rods.
“I don’t much like hippies.”
And everything smells like death: the gas, this man, and those wrinkled carrion sticks. HOT DOGS, the sign says, 2 FOR $1.50.
The dog in me is getting panicky. She doesn’t like the overheated air buffeting my skin or the slick plastic smell everywhere.
And she wants to claw out that man’s disapproving eyes.
The bell rings, and those disapproving eyes narrow, watching Ti carefully. “Where’d you go?”
“Bathroom,” Ti says in that quiet, dark voice that feels like night air on my soul right about now. “If that’s okay by you.”
“No, it’s not okay. I don’t like you people. I don’t like that you buy up all that land and don’t do a damn thing with it. I don’t like that when I try to do something with my land, land that has been in my family for generations, Torrance calls in the government with some crap about polluting the aquifer.”
Ah. So this is the Junkyard Man.
“You know, one of our pups fell—” I start, but Ti interrupts me.
“Why don’t I just pay, and then we’ll be on our way.” He hands the man another one of the prepaid cards the Pack keeps in a box in the office.
“I’ll take a receipt,” Ti says when the man hands the card back.
“You’ll take yourself out of here is what you’ll do.” And the man pulls back his camouflage jacket. I see the handle of a big gun stuck in a holster.
In that second, my breath comes fast and my heart beats hard and a growl rumbles through my chest, but Ti just shakes his head at me.
How is it that he is never afraid? How is it that I never scent that cocktail of salt and old leather, the potent combination of sweat and adrenaline, the smell of fear? In one step, he pulls the receipt out of the cash register and hovers above the man so that the Junkyard Man can feel the many inches Ti has on him. Feel that this man, my bedfellow, has the BMI of a jackhammer.
The bell rings at the door, and the man lets his jacket fall, covering the gun. It’s no one, just a thin older man with a yellowed mustache and yellow fingers.
The man looks for a moment at Ti, and then his eyes slide back to the Junkyard Man. “Marlboro Red,
Anderson. Soft pack.”
Ti’s mouth tightens, his nose flares under his furrowed brow, and my unflappable bedfellow suddenly smells like a crushed cottonmouth.
“Time to go,” he snaps, putting his hand around my arm.
The door to the back office is opened slightly. The boss watches through the crack.
“I can’t believe you let him treat us that way.” Bafflement flits across the boss’s pimply face as I point to Anderson. “I don’t know how you got to be in charge, because you’ve got the balls of an Omega.”
Ti jerks hard on my arm, and I stumble across the threshold of the body shop.
“What would make you say that?” he says, clambering into the car beside me. “He’s not in charge; he’s just some high-school kid.”
“Didn’t you see? It said, right here…” I jab my finger at a spot high on my left breast. “It said ‘BOSS’ in big letters.”
“Oh Jesus, Sil.”
Ti starts the car, and the engine roars on. I sniff hard, trying to get rid of the smell of the carrion sticks, but all I get is the smell of petroleum. The faces of the angry junkyard man and the frightened boy who was not the boss and the man with the yellowed mustache tapping his red-and-white package against the heel of his palm stare through the window until we are out of sight.
At a stop sign, Ti reaches across me to pull on the seat belt.
But I’m feeling angry and like I need to run, and I push him away.
“You have to wear it.”
“I can’t.”
A car behind us beeps, and I leap out of my seat.
“Listen to me,” Ti says. “Let me just get you out of town, then we’ll undo it.”
Whoever it is leans on their horn, and my breathing comes faster, and I kick off my shoes.
“Shit,” Ti hisses, then steps on the gas, one hand holding the wheel, the other pushing me back against the seat.
