Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  This is an old battle, Rin’s strictness about food. She is strict about a lot of matters. No TV, no cell phones. No radio, either, not even in the car. Yet there are limits to how much even she can cushion her daughter. Thanks to the law, she is obliged to send her to school, and there, as if by osmosis, Juney has absorbed the need for the detritus that fills American lives. Despite all Rin’s efforts, Juney has caught the disease of Want.

  Rin wonders if Juney’s daddy would approve of how she’s raising her: Jay, the only man she’s ever wanted, ever will want. Jay, gone for as long as Juney has been alive. And look what he left behind. A broken soldier. A fatherless daughter. The wolves who patrol the woods like souls freed from the dead, their thick-furred bodies bold and wild—the ones who won’t be tamed, won’t be polluted, won’t be used.

  It was Jay’s idea to raise wolves. His plan was to do it together once they were done soldiering—he had always wanted to save them from extinction, the cruelty of zoos and those who wish to crush them into submission. “They need us, Rin,” he said to her once, his big hand resting tenderly on her cheek. “And we need them.” So when she found herself alone and pregnant, she decided to carry out the plan anyway. She tracked down a shady breeder over by Oneonta and rescued two newborn pups, blue-eyed and snub-nosed, blind, deaf and helpless, their fur as soft as goose down, before he could sell them to some tattooed sadist who would chain them up in his yard. One was female, the other male, so she hoped they would breed one day. As they did. “Never try to break wolves,” Jay told her. “They’ve got loyalty. They might even love you, who knows? But we must never tame them. They’re wild animals and that’s how it should stay.”

  Her guardian angels. Or devils. She hasn’t decided which.

  “We’re here!” Juney sings out. She knows the town of Huntsville even when it’s midmorning quiet and raining: the asphalt steaming, the wet-dust funk of newly soaked concrete.

  Rin drives down the main drag, a wide, lonely street with half its windows boarded up and not a soul to be seen. A Subway on the left, a Dunkin’ Donuts on the right, its sign missing so many letters it reads, duk do. The CVS and three banks that knocked out all the local diners and dime stores. A Styrofoam cup skitters along the gutter, chipped and muddied by rain.

  Pulling up the hill into an asphalt parking lot, Rin chooses a spot as far away from the other cars as she can get, her stomach balling into a leathery knot. She hates this town. She hates this clinic. She hates doctors and nurses. She hates people.

  Pause, swallow, command the knot to release. It won’t. She sweeps her eyes over the macadam, down the hill to the clinic, over to the creek bubbling along behind it. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “Mommy, we’re in America.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.” One breath, two. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  If Rin could walk with her wolves flanking her, she would. Instead, she imagines them here. Ebony takes the front guard, his coat the black of boot polish, eyes green as a summer pond, the ivory curve of his fangs bared. Silver brings up the rear, her fur as white as morning frost, her wasp-yellow eyes scanning for the enemy, a warning growl in her throat. And the big stately one—the alpha male, the one Rin named Gray, his body a streak of muscle, his coat marked in sweeps of black and charcoal—walks beside her with Juney’s fingers nestled into the thick fur of his back, his jaw open and slavering, ready to tear off the head of anyone who so much as looks at her.

  With her invisible wolves around her and her daughter gripping her hand, Rin plows through the now-strafing rain to the clapboard box of a clinic and up to its plate-glass front, on which, painted in jaunty gold lettering, are the words Captain Thomas C. Brittall Federal Health Care Center’s Pediatrics/U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

  “Department of Vaporized Adolescents,” she mutters, pushing open the cold glass door and its cold metal handle. They step inside.

  Naema Jassim is standing in the white starkness of that same clinic, suspended in one of the few moments of tranquillity she will be granted all day. Her hands, long-fingered and painfully dry from constant washing, press down on the windowsill as she gazes into the hot wetness beyond. The sky has turned an uneasy green, tight with electricity and tension. Even from inside her clinic office, the air smells of singed hair and rust.

  “Doctor?” Wendy Fitch, the nurse, pokes her head into the room. “Your nine a.m.’s here. We have four more before we close. TV says the hurricane’s due around two.”

  “Yes, the rain, it has already come.” Naema turns from the window, so slight she is almost lost inside her voluminous white coat, her black hair gathered in a loose knot at her neck. Face long and narrow, eyes the gold of a cat’s. A star-shaped scar splashes across her otherwise smooth right cheek.

  Behind her, a sudden wind catches the weeping willow outside, sending its branches into a paroxysm of lashing and groaning. But the tightly closed windows and turbine roar of the clinic’s air-conditioning, set chillingly low to counteract the bacteria of the sick, render the premature storm as silent as dust.

  Naema slides her clipboard under her arm and moves to the door.

  Outside, the trees bend double and spring back up like whips. The clouds convulse. A new deluge drives into the ground, sharp as javelins.

  A mile uphill, the wind seizes a tall white pine, shaking it until its ninety-year-old trunk, riddled with blister rust, splits diagonally across with a shriek. It drops onto the Huntsville Dam, already thin, already old, knocking out chunks of concrete along its crest until it resembles a row of chipped teeth.

  Rin grips Juney’s hand while they sit in the waiting room, her palms sweating as she scans every inch of the place: walls too white, lights too bright, posters too cheerful, a television screen as big as a door blasting a cooking show. But she refuses to look at the other women. Their calculating eyes. Their judgments. Their treachery.

  The monologue starts up in her head, as it always insists on doing at the VA, even though she is only in an affiliated pediatrics clinic, not a full-fledged hospital full of mangled soldiers and melted faces. She fights it as best she can, trying to focus on Juney, on her wolves growling in their hot fur by her feet, but it marches on anyhow, oblivious to her resistance: Where were you ladies when I needed you, huh? I saw you fresh from your showers; I saw you listening. Scattered, every one of you, like bedbugs under a lamp. Where were you when, where were you. . . .

  “Stop.” Juney pulls Rin’s hand to her chest. “Mommy, stop.”

  Rin looks for her wolves. They are crouched around her still, tongues lolling, their musky fur and meat-breath reassuring. She should have brought Betty, her service dog. She keeps telling herself she doesn’t need Betty. But she does.

  Juney lifts her nose and Rin can tell she is smelling the medicinal stinks of the clinic. All scents are colors to Juney, an imagined rainbow Rin will never see. The disinfectant in the wall dispensers, sickly sweet and alcohol sharp—this is her yellow. The detergent of the nurses’ uniforms, soapy and stringent, she calls bright orange. The chemical-lemon odor of the floor polish: purple. The pink of freshly mown grass, magenta of oatmeal, green-bright breath of their cats, black of their dogs panting. The glaring white of her mother’s alarm.

  Rin sends her mind to her hand, still clasped against Juney’s narrow chest. Juney’s heartbeat reminds Rin of the chipmunk she once held in her palm, soft and weightless, alive and warm—a tiny bundle of pulsating fluff.

  Another soldier mother is squeezed into the far corner, holding a feverish infant to her breast. A second sits by the wall with her child, its back in a brace. A third walks in with her toddler daughter, whose right hand is wrapped in a bandage. The beams of the women’s eyes burn across the room, avoiding one another yet crossing like headlights, smoldering with their collective sense of betrayal.

  Time inchworms by.

  Finally, a hefty nurse with frizzled blond hair steps through the inner door, the name fitch pinned loudly to her bosom. She runs her eyes ov
er Rin and Juney and all the other mothers and children suspended in this stark, white room. “Rin Drummond,” she calls.

  Rin cannot speak.

  “Mommy?” Juney lifts Rin’s hand off her chipmunk heart and jumps down from her chair. “We’re ready,” she tells the nurse and pulls her mother’s arm. She and Rin follow the nurse’s broad back down the corridor and into an examining room.

  “Just strip to your undies, honeypie, and hop up here,” the nurse tells Juney. “Doctor Jassim will be here in a jiffy.”

  “Thank you. I know what to do. I’m nine years old and my name is June Drummond.”

  “Of course it is,” the nurse says, unruffled.

  “Did you say ‘Jassim’?” Rin asks, finding her voice at last. “Who’s he?”

  “Doctor Jassim is a woman. She’s been a resident with us for half a year now. She’s very good, don’t worry.”

  “Where the fuck is she from?” Rin’s hands curl up tight and white.

  “Mrs. Drummond, relax, okay? She’s the best physician we have here. You’re lucky to get her.” The nurse leaves, closing the door with a snap that sounds more as though she is locking them in than giving them privacy.

  Juney peels off her T-shirt and shorts and kicks away her flip-flops. Both she and Rin are dressed for the heat of the August day, not for the clinic’s hypothermic AC, so her skin is covered in goose bumps. Rin finds a baby blue hospital robe hanging on the back of the door and wraps Juney’s shivery body in it before lifting her onto the plank of the examining table, its paper crackling beneath her. She is so fragile, her Juney, a wisp of rib cage and shoulder blade, legs pin-thin as a robin’s. Rin holds her tight, not sure who is comforting whom.

  The wind rampages through woods and parking lots, streets and gardens, seizing sumacs, maples, and willows and shaking them until their boughs drop like shot geese. Up the hill, the rain-bloated creek presses its new weight against the crumbling dam, pushing and pounding until, with a great roar, it bursts through, leaps its banks and rushes headlong down the slope toward the clinic; a foaming wall of red mud, branches, and rocks flattening every shrub and tree in its path.

  Inside, the air-conditioning hums. Voices murmur. Babies whimper.

  Wendy Fitch hovers by the door of the examining room, checking her watch. Dr. Jassim might be great with her patients but the woman has zero sense of time. Whether this has something to do with her culture or is only an individual quirk, Wendy doesn’t know, but the doctor needs to finish up here and fetch her son from his friend’s house, the boys’ summer baseball camp having sensibly closed against the impending storm. The rain is beating on the windows now and Wendy can feel the patients’ parents growing more restless by the minute, as eager as she is to get back to their canned food and bottled water, their batteries and candles. Her pulse quickens. As a lowly nurse, she has to bear the brunt of the parents’ ire, and these are no ordinary parents, either. They are all military veterans, half of them ramped up or angry. Like that pit bull of a woman, Rin Drummond.

  “We better hurry, storm’s coming on quick,” Wendy says when Naema emerges at last from the first examining room. “Watch out for this one,” she adds in a whisper, touching her temple. “Room three.”

  Naema nods with a resigned smile and walks toward the door.

  Rin can’t believe they gave Juney an Arab for a doctor. Typical of the VA to hire the second-rate. The woman probably bought her certificate online, did her training on YouTube. Probably blew up some sucker of a soldier or two on her way here, as well.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  Rin takes a breath. And another. “It’s okay. It’s just this place.” She strokes her daughter’s hair and pulls her close once more, feeling her frail body shiver.

  A knock on the door. Gentle, yet it sends a spasm through Rin’s every nerve.

  The door opens and in walks a woman in a white coat, as if she’s a real doctor. No head scarf, at least, but there’s that familiar olive-brown skin and blue-black hair. She’s carrying a clipboard file, which she reads before even saying hello, which Rin considers damned rude. Then she looks up.

  A splattered white scar on her right cheekbone. Most likely a shrapnel wound. Rin would know, having some fifteen herself.

  “Good morning,” the doctor says to Juney, voice snake-oil smooth, accent not much more than a lilt but oh so recognizable. “You are June, right?”

  But Juney isn’t listening. Her head’s up, cocked at the angle that means her mind is elsewhere. “Mommy?”

  Rin is shaking. The face. The scar. Her breath is coming short and airless.

  “Mommy?” Juney’s voice is more urgent now. “I hear something.”

  “There is no need to be frightened, dear,” the doctor says, and Rin can’t tell whether she’s talking to Juney or her.

  “Mommy!” Juney jumps down from the examining table, her robe falling off, leaving her in nothing but white cotton underpants, skin and bone. “Something bad’s happening!”

  “Get out of here!” Rin yells at the doctor.

  “What is the matter?” The doctor looks confused.

  “No, not her!” Juney cries. “Run!” And she hurls herself into the dangerous air, unable to see the metal table covered with glass bottles and needles, the jutting chair legs on the floor.

  Rin reaches out and catches her, but she wriggles free in true terror. “Let us out!” she screams, and the doctor turns around, bewildered, saying something Rin can’t hear because at that moment the window bursts open and a torrent of red water crashes through, smashing them against the wall, knocking them over, pounding them with a whorl of mud and branches and shattered glass. . . .

  Rin’s soldier training, her war-wolf heart, these are not in her blood for nothing. She struggles to her feet, seizes Juney around the waist and forces the door open, kicking away the flailing doctor tangled in her white coat, her long hair, her scar, and her legacy.

  Rin slams her face down in the water and steps on her, using her body to lever her daughter through the door and out of the water to safety.

  2

  WOLVES

  On the morning after the hurricane, two ten-year-old boys climb onto the wall of a stone-knobbled bridge and peer down at the remains of the creek beneath. For years they have waded its waters, built forts by its banks, explored its icicled caves in winter, lain in wait for its beavers in spring, but the storm ruined all that. Now the creek is so plugged with logs and mud it’s nothing but a mess of trickles wandering lost and directionless, like the spill from a kicked-over bucket.

  “We can’t even fish in this,” says Flanner, freckled, orange-haired, and bony as a goat. “Bet the fishes are all drowned.”

  Tariq, equally bony but brown and loose-limbed, pushes away the curls irritating his brow. “Fish can’t drown, dummy.”

  “They could if mud gets gunged up in their gills.”

  This is what happened to Tariq’s mother in the clinic, but he’s not about to say so in case he cries. He raises his head to survey the wet and ragged woods around them. The ground is smothered with so many leaf-covered branches the trees seem to be standing on their heads.

  “Now what’re we gonna do?” Flanner says. “Everything’s gone to hell.”

  “We could hunt for the wolves.” Tariq slides off the wall, his prosthetic leg making a light, fleshy thump as he lands.

  “How do you know there are any wolves? They might just be dogs or coyotes.” Flanner jumps down, too.

  “I don’t. But it’d be chill to find out.”

  Flanner hesitates. “How many are there, you think?”

  “Seven, maybe? Twelve?”

  “A whole pack?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  The boys struggle through the trees for some time, clambering over trunks as slick and fat as manatees, dropping to crawl under bristling logs, their knees pressing into the cobbled mud. Tariq sniffs the air, sour-sweet and steamy, with a tinge of rot—not the way his woods norma
lly smell at all.

  “If we do find the wolves, what do we do then?” Flanner asks.

  “Feed them.”

  “Feed ’em what? Your fatso butt?”

  “Shut it, Flanner.”

  They hike on, sweating their prepubescent sweat, slapping at mosquitoes, batting away deerflies. The mugginess left over from the storm seems to have drawn every mean biting bug for miles.

  “S’pose the wolves want to eat us?” Flanner adds after they have walked farther into the woods than they have ever walked before—so far, it is as still and quiet as a vast room. He is panting now, the words coming out in staccato gasps. S’pose. Wolves. Eat. Us. “I think we need weapons. Sticks. Big heavy sticks. And we need to sharpen one end to make spears.”

  They kick through the mucky underbrush for several minutes, branches snatching at their hair, brambles raking their shins, until they find a sturdy stick each. “You got a knife?” Tariq says.

  “Yeah, the one Dad gave me.” The fact that Flanner is the only boy of the two with a father, and a father who happens to be a marine sergeant fighting in Afghanistan, adds considerably to his authority. “It’s blunt as a thumb but I think it’ll work.”

  He and Tariq whittle the ends of their sticks with a series of deft scrapes until they are honed to pleasingly sharp points. Armed with a spear each, they move deeper into the woods.

  Then they hear it: a long, low, pulse-freezing growl.

  They stop, a sensation like ice-cold ants running over their skins. They listen without moving. Listen a long time.

  Nothing.

  “That-was-like-a-dog-right?” Flanner says.

  “I don’t think so.” Tariq’s voice is charged with excitement. “I don’t think so at all.”

  They press forward. Or Tariq does. Flanner lags behind.

  They hear it again. Even closer, or so it seems. It is hard to tell about sounds in the woods. Sounds bounce against trees, detour through clearings, slap against bluffs. Still, it’s the same low growl they heard before: long, deep, and scalp-shriveling.