Terry Persun's Magical Realism Collection

by Persun, Terry

  “Hi. Gail, right?”

  She smiled shyly.

  “Gail, this is my friend Gary.”

  They greeted politely, then she asked if they’d like to order. After she left, Wolf waited for Gary to speak.

  “I’m fairly sure we can get you off,” Gary said right away.

  “What about the blood, the drag marks?”

  “There are no direct witnesses. Evidence points to you, sure, but the old man who saw you up there is not a very reliable person. I think I can prove that through his drunkenness he could have been mistaken in seeing only one person. It’s a little bit of a stretch, but all I have to do is place doubt into the minds of the jurors. In the mean time, I’ll continue to look for others.”

  “There must have been other people in the area as well. Wouldn’t you think there’d be hikers or other vision questers or something?”

  Gary looked into Wolf ’s eyes briefly, then turned away. “Oh, here comes breakfast,” he said. He leaned back and spread his arms placing his palms at opposite corners of the table. Gail placed his breakfast plate in front of him, then slipped Wolf ’s to him. She filled Gary’s coffee cup, but Wolf held up his hand to reject a refill. “Water’d be fine,” he told her.

  “I’ve either personally, or through a local detective, checked all that out,” Gary told Wolf. “I’ve come up with nothing. No one.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Fine, Wolf. You know differently, you find them.”

  “I’m not allowed to leave town.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Gary said sarcastically, “you’re the one in suspected of murder. I’m only the lawyer.”

  “Christ, Gary, I’m trying to help.”

  “It really bothers you doesn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “That you can’t run this show. You can’t manipulate everyone into doing what you want. You’re on the sidelines, Wolf, and, let’s face it, you don’t know how to play the game.”

  Wolf tightened his jaw. He wanted his lawyer to be his ally; arguing would do no good. He took a deep breath, then smiled broadly, “You know me too well. It is frustrating. But you’re right, you’re the expert. So, help me to learn to be supportive. Teach me the part of audience.”

  Gary gave Wolf a puzzled look, then began to eat. “You’re acting pretty strange. Sometimes I wonder if I’m with the real Llewellyn Smith. I wonder where the old Wolf is. The one who’s always trying to down you, as though you are prey. I don’t know which frightens me more: the old Wolf or this strange new one. I keep waiting for you to reach over and try to rip out my throat.”

  “It won’t happen if I can help it,” Wolf said.

  “If you can help it?”

  “Those two are struggling, at this very moment, inside me, each for control. I don’t always know which of them will win at any one moment, or which one will come out into the open.”

  “You scare me sometimes. Like you’re suddenly psychotic. You talk of the two parts of yourself as though they were two real people, but they’re not.” Gary leaned forward. “Wolf, there is only one you inside there, but you need to figure out who that is. If a second you suddenly appears in court, you’re dead.”

  “I know.”

  They sat in silence until they were finished and the plates removed. Wiping his mouth with his napkin, Gary said, “Take it easy. I’ll do my job. Seriously, I think it can be quick and easy, but you’ve got to figure out what’s going on inside you. You’ve got to stabilize. Once this thing’s over, I suggest you see someone.”

  Wolf heard Gary, but couldn’t answer. With his head lowered, he nodded slowly.

  “That’s it, buddy. That’s the update. I’ll let you know when we have to go to court. I’ll keep you informed along the way if anything new comes up, as well.” Gary pushed back from the table. “Get rest. Lots of it. I need you conscious and consistent.”

  “I hear you,” Wolf said.

  “Right.” Gary stood up. “Look, I’ve got business.”

  Wolf looked at him. “Thank you.”

  There was something about their interaction that wasn’t right. There had often been a sort of mutual contempt for one another, but this was more than that. Gary turned from Wolf ’s stare and walked down the aisle past the other customers and out the door.

  Wolf noticed that something didn’t quite smell right. He looked around the restaurant, but knew it was symbolic. He decided, when he got back to the hotel he should call Joe. He had only talked with Joe once since he’d been back in town. Maybe Joe knew something.

  Gary had left enough cash for breakfast, and then some, Wolf noticed. The tip was equal to the bill, but rather than take the change, he left it for Gail.

  Gary was nowhere in sight when Wolf stepped back outside. It was mid-morning, nearly ten o’clock. The sun had begun to heat the air, driving away the morning chill. The parking lot had begun to fill up also, as people arrived for work. The shops along the strip were preparing for the day. A few people hung around outside a bank branch, waiting for it to open its doors. As he walked towards the hotel, three birds landed in a tree near him. As he passed that tree and approached another, the birds followed along. Aware of their arrival in the second tree, Wolf automatically slowed and listened closely to their noisy chirps. He didn’t want to stop dead in fear that it might frighten them, yet he wanted to hear any sound they might make. He thought about their number as well. What significance could he find in ‘three birds’? Nothing came. As he passed the second and approached a third tree, they followed once more. They chirped and twittered in excitement, but did not produce any clear or harmonic sound that Wolf could decipher. After Wolf passed the third tree, the birds flew away completely.

  Three birds, three trees, or three times. Was it, then, just the number three or was it three plus three, three times three? His mind raced, searching for some sort of answer. He wanted a lead. He decided to follow anything that passed by number. The days, hours, phone calls, meals. He almost always ate three times a day now that he had little else to do. He noticed a red truck pass by in the increasingly heavy traffic. The third red truck, he thought. Or the third Ford. Of course, it could mean the sixth or ninth as well.

  Wolf shook his head to loosen the gears, shake out the spiders. Too much, that’s what it was. Was he capable of simplifying or did he have to continue driving himself nuts by analyzing so much of what might just mean nothing at all? ‘See someone,’ Gary had said. Perhaps Gary was right. Help from a trained professional just might be what he did need.

  At the hotel, Wolf set his wooden box on the floor and sat crosslegged in front of it. He chanted in a low, melodic tone, imagining himself standing and turning to each direction with his arms spread to his sides. His underlying motive was to understand what the three birds in the three trees meant. At each position, he recalled the symbols that Running Wolf had etched into the Earth. They danced and swayed, shifted and moved.

  A loud click pulled him from his meditation. When he looked up, the room maid stood in the doorway, her eyes wide. “Excuse me,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” Wolf told her. His hand waved slowly, his eyes glazed over. He remained still in a half-trance.

  The maid ducked out and the door clicked a second time. Wolf automatically counted the clicks, even though he didn’t expect a third.

  Back into meditation, he continued from where he had been interrupted. Again, slowly, the symbols shimmied, lifted, danced and spun inside his altered state of consciousness. Then three birds appeared in the air quadrant. They flitted around, then departed, going East. East, Wolf noted, air.

  As he finished, he tried to envision Night Walker, tried to call out to him, but the Indian didn’t appear. The session was over. He could feel it. He quieted and slowly opened his eyes. He clenched his fists, knuckles cracking. He turned his neck to crack it. The total stillness had held his skeleton in check. As he rose from the floor, his back and knees also cracked loudly.

&
nbsp; He had been on the floor for over an hour. Except for the single interruption, it had been continuous. He pulled a notebook from his briefcase and opened to a blank page. ‘Night Walker, air, to the East,’ he wrote. In those words lay the answer to the outcome of his situation. But how could he tell Gary, who would not listen to him, who thought him crazy, thought that he was vying for control, interfering? There were many reasons why Gary would not listen to him, and no reason why he would.

  Wolf couldn’t leave town. Who could? He looked at his watch, noon. He picked up the box and placed it in its drawer. He still needed to call Joe. He needed to touch base with someone who had a little compassion.

  The three birds had led him to the answer, but he couldn’t trust his lawyer with the information. He feared that Gary would refuse to follow the lead, strictly on the basis of where it came from.

  Wolf propped the two pillows against the rear headboard of the bed and sat against them, shifting into a comfortable position. He picked up the phone and dialed Joe’s line at the hospital. “Dr. Berger, please.”

  After a few minutes, Joe’s voice rang through the receiver. “Dr. Berger.”

  “Joe, how are you?”

  In a voice that inflected halfway between depression and anger, Joe said, “Wolf.”

  Wolf could see the head nodding in disapproval at the other end of the phone. “What’s wrong, Joe.”

  “You don’t know, do you? You could have guessed, if you’d only thought for one second. But you don’t do that. Not for anyone but yourself, now, do you?”

  “What? What have I done now?” He had expected Joe to listen, expected him to be different from Gary. Had Joe heard only one side of things? Had he spent so much time with Gary that their attitudes had become the same? Not likely, Wolf thought. Joe had too much sense, was too fair a person, too caring. What was it, then? Did Joe really think he could have killed a man? “I didn’t do it, Joe,” Wolf said, explaining. “I didn’t kill anyone. I couldn’t have.”

  Joe waited at the other end of the phone. “No, Wolf, you don’t get it.”

  “Get what? For Christ’s sake, I turn to you for support and what do I get?” Anger burst from him with such a force that he couldn’t stop the words. The old Wolf. He recognized it. He must fight it, he thought, but its first blast was out. “I’m sorry, Joe, I’m sorry.” The words were hard to say, to get through the anger. “I didn’t mean to jump at you like that.”

  “It doesn’t matter right now.”

  “What do you mean? Is something wrong? Julie? Michael?”

  “Gary.” That’s all Joe said. He said it softly and with a sense of sorrow in his voice.

  Wolf held onto the word. It was beginning to filter through to him what the matter was. “Oh, no.”

  “Did your brain kick in?”

  “God, no.”

  Then, to remove any questions from Wolf ’s mind, Joe said, “Lynne told Gary about the two of you, but not before she served him divorce papers.”

  “Oh, good God, no. Why?”

  “Lynne has always been that way. We’ve all seen the cruelty in her at one time or another.”

  “How’s Gary?”

  “You don’t want to know how this affects you? What’s wrong Wolf-man, forget how to go for the throat?”

  “Joe, please, you don’t know. You don’t. Wolves are teachers, they scout things out then come back to teach.”

  “Well, I don’t want to learn what you have to teach. It’s destructive.”

  “I’ve changed.”

  “Not soon enough.”

  “All right, I deserve this, but, really, how’s Gary handling this?”

  “He’s destroyed. This is the worst thing that could happen to him. He loves his family—the kids, his wife. That’s what he is much of the time. There have always been problems, but he’d never leave. He sees that as failure. And you, you know how the two of you are. What you did dropped him like shot game.” Joe took a deep breath. “You fucked up. Worse than you’ve ever done before. You killed a friend’s life.”

  “Don’t say that, please.” Wolf began to cry. Never before in his life would he have cried for such a reason, but he could feel—actually feel—Gary’s heartache, and hated himself for what he’d done.”

  “I don’t know how Gary is holding together,” Joe said. “Perhaps he is transferring his emotions, his grief, into his job. That’s the only thing I can imagine.”

  Wolf remembered how he hurt when Julie left him, and there had been no other man in the picture at all. “Gary, Gary, Gary. What have I done?”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Joe whispered into the other end of the phone.

  Quietly, and in all seriousness, Wolf asked, “Will he lose this case to get back at me?”

  “No,” Joe said. “He’d never do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a better man than you.”

  Wolf set the phone into the cradle without saying good-bye. His entire body hurt, like a flu bug had grabbed hold of him causing muscle aches and nausea. With his elbows on the table, Wolf lowered his head into his hands and began to sob. He could literally sense what was going on inside Gary. What had he done? Why had he done it?

  After a long while, Wolf undressed and showered. He felt dirty inside and out. He let the water run in long rivulets down his face, shoulders, and back, washing tears and filth from him. His mouth opened to let the cleansing occur as much inside as he could allow without gagging. He swallowed large gulps of lukewarm water, then spit mouthfuls into the bottom of the tub. He stayed in there a long while, wondering what he could do to ease Gary’s pain, begging for an answer. But, there was no answer. Nothing came. The past was over. He had done what he had done, at the time, with no remorse. But now, he was a changed man. What does it mean now? A lesson? A mistake? But it affects another’s life. And he knew, while in the process, that what he was doing was wrong.

  He dried himself off and dressed in silence. The time to stop doing wrong was the moment he became aware of it. He had failed himself and his friend. Even through the continual rivalry between them, all those years, he still regarded Gary as his friend. Wolf needed to reacquaint his real self with the real Gary. With a new relationship, beginning right away, maybe their friendship could come out of the dark corners of their lives and into the light where it belonged.

  Now was the time to make things different. Deciding to make contact, Wolf knew only how to reach the legal firm Gary worked out of while on the case. He did not even know where Gary stayed while in town. He called H & L Legal Services, but, according to the receptionist, Gary would take no calls—not even from Wolf.

  “Listen, then,” Wolf told the receptionist. “Give Gary this message: He can find Night Walker somewhere East of here. There must be some little town, maybe at an air strip, or in the air somehow, climbing a tree maybe.”

  “Climbing a tree?” she said, questioning his message.

  “Yes, something to do with air. The idea of air or air specifically, I don’t know, but air is a key word, just as East is a key word.”

  “East and air. Well, I’m not sure…”

  “Just tell him, please. I’ve got to trust that he’ll know what to do with the information.” Or throw it away, Wolf thought. It all hinged on whether Gary was game at winning or losing the case. If Joe was wrong, and Gary was going to lose, Wolf couldn’t do anything about it anyhow. Yet, something inside Wolf told him to stick with Gary. “A better man,” Joe had said. He had to believe it was true.

  Feeling alone and concerned even after affirming his resolve to stick with Gary, Wolf phoned Julie to speak with Michael. His excitement at hearing his son’s voice threw Wolf into a list of questions concerning school, play, television and Michael’s general feelings. How did he like where he lived? How did he feel about his step-father? Did he feel loved?

  At first Michael was reticent and answered slowly, with long pauses, as though he didn’t believe it was his father
he was speaking to. But soon, he opened up and got excited about his friends, his ideas, and his general understanding of the world.

  By the time Wolf got off the phone, he felt as though Michael was being taken good care of by his mother and step-father, that there was nothing to worry about there, no matter what happened.

  Wolf went back and forth about his situation, and after speaking with Michael, he felt better, as though all was right. Like the spider weaving its web in the medicine wheel without the conscious understanding of Wolf or the rest of the world, Wolf felt as though much more was going on than he could understand. Perhaps the Great Spirit was watching. Or God, if one was different than the other. And if neither of those, then possibly just a greater complexity than his personal world of understanding encompassed. Perhaps, on some grander scale, Wolf had become a symbol for another being, or perhaps only in reference to people who knew him. Like the spider, he wanted the symbol of his life to evolve with integrity. He wanted no loose threads.

  CHAPTER 11

  IT WAS THREE A.M. Wolf sat in the middle of the floor, in the open space at the foot of the bed, and rocked forward and back. His wooden box lay open in front of him. He chanted quietly in a very meditative state.

  He had awakened early with the idea of meditating to find answers to the question that had been hammering at the back of his head for days. What was he to teach? As a wolf, what had he brought back from his travels, his adventure, that he could pass along to others?

  Although there seemed to be many things, articulating them had become increasingly difficult. Direct statements eluded him. He hoped that meditation would help, would clear his thoughts, bring them into language where he could write them down and analyze them.

  After a long while rocking and chanting, he leaned back against the bed and sat. Although his meditation had been animated with animals and plants, like a bizarre dream that went in numerous directions at once, he was unable to follow any particular path of logic. Perhaps logic was out of the question. Letting his mind wander, he considered all he’d seen in meditation, thought of its sequence, its haphazard movement. Nothing seemed to click, and when he finally decided to write each image into his notebook, even the sequence became shadowy. It all began to fade together as though it had all happened at the exact moment, like an hour and a half hadn’t really gone by. Something he’d read once, or heard—possibly from Joe—said that life itself all took place in one holy instant. Now he wondered what a holy instant represented, like one human year equaling seven dog years, was one holy instant equal to a millennium in human perception?