Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  “Fuck,” Flanner gasps, even though his mother shouts at him every time he says it. “Fuck, that’s close.”

  And then, a howl. An actual howl. And each boy knows with an instinct carved deep into his genes by his cave-painting ancestors that this howl is nothing like the howl of either a dog or a coyote.

  Flanner can neither move nor, for the moment, speak. But Tariq speeds up, crashing through the underbrush with his peculiar loping gait, as if he can’t wait to meet a wolf or even shake its paw. In no time at all, his curly hair is indistinguishable from the patchwork of leaves, and the back of his T-shirt has dwindled to a tiny red stamp.

  “Damn,” Flanner mutters. Slowly and a safe distance behind, he follows, his surroundings electric with danger now. Twigs snap like jaws. The air pants. Something slavers behind him. An invisible squirrel rattles the leaves nearby and he jumps.

  “Flan?” he hears Tariq call, his voice sounding small and oddly far away. “Come.”

  Flanner creeps through the trees, his heart somersaulting.

  “Look.” Tariq points at a towering chain-link fence a few feet away. “What do you think that’s doing here?”

  Juney is squatting beside Rin in the remains of their vegetable patch, running her fingers over boggy lettuces and gashed tomatoes to feel for any plants that might have survived the storm. She is singing one of her off-tune songs again, something about rain and mud and drowning birds, when her hand falls still and she stops.

  “Hiccup?” She pulls a small and matted clump from under a cabbage. “What happened to you?” And she starts to cry.

  Hiccup was the littlest of their cats, a tiny gray thing only a year old, slight as a comma, and the only one who would consent to sit on their laps. Had Rin switched on her car radio for once and put aside her clusterbomb of paranoias, she would have known the hurricane was coming. Then she could have locked the cats inside to keep them safe. Along with a whole lot else.

  “Soldiers don’t cry over the dead,” she almost says. Then shuts herself up. This is not a lesson she wants her daughter to learn; not the way she and Jay had to learn it.

  “Poor Hiccup,” she says instead. “We’ll give her a special burial, okay, little bean?” But she wishes she had been the one to find the kitten. Juney has gone through enough. After Rin hauled her out of the mud and screams and water the color of bloodied milk, she ran with her up the hill to the car, bundled her inside, and wrapped her in a dog-haired blanket, holding her close until she stopped shaking. “We’re safe now,” she called over the racket, rain battering the roof, wind rocking the car. “You all right?”

  “Yes, you saved me, Mommy. ’Course I’m all right.”

  But the entire drive home, while Rin maneuvered through sheets of water, roads morphing into mud, branches hurtling at her like missiles, she wondered how much Juney knew of what had just happened and how much she understood.

  Juney rubs away her tears with her forearm. “We’ll bury her under the bird feeder,” she says, her voice still a wobble. “That was her favorite place.”

  It’s true. Hiccup used to crouch there for hours, tail twitching, eyes fixed, watching the birds with the unwavering devotion of a creature addicted to murder. But when the stream behind the barn breached its banks, it washed the bird feeder to kingdom come, along with half of Rin’s chickens and the newest-born of her pretty white goats. She found him drowned in the runoff ditch by the driveway, skinny legs snapped. Juney was feeding him from a bottle only two days ago—she had just named him Twigs. Rin hasn’t the heart to tell her about that yet.

  The animals are not all that’s suffered, though; Rin’s entire property looks as though it’s been mortared, which has shaken her more than she cares to admit—this is, after all, the only true home she has known. As a girl, she was always moving, her parents—father a furniture salesman till booze got the better of him, mother a kindergarten teacher sunk-stuck in depression—hauling her and her brother from one hidey-hole to another. All those nights of being poked awake. “Get up, we’re leaving.” Tiptoeing out under the silence of the moon. Slipping away from towns and landlords. Crossing state borders. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania . . . Driving for hours and days and more hours, her nose in a book to shut it all out. Changing their names, changing their schools. Three suitcases on a bare floor.

  At least the storm left the house unscathed, thanks to Jay’s ancestors, who built it more than two hundred years ago to withstand this northeastern weather, floods, hurricanes, snow, and all. Once grand and proud, the old farmhouse does look a wreck now, lopsided and paint-peeled, more gray than white, a string of rooms pinned to its side as if in afterthought, the porch dangling like a dropped jaw. Half its green shutters are missing, too, leaving the double row of windows on the front looking asymmetrical and confused. But at heart the house is so solid Rin would bet it could last through a dozen more hurricanes, along with whatever else this haywire climate might have up its sleeve.

  Juney lifts her head in her listening way, the fingers of one hand caressing the air, the other resting on Hiccup’s corpse. Juney doesn’t mind handling dead animals. She is so at home with the earth and its creatures, Rin sometimes thinks she gave birth to a sapling, not a girl at all: a blond wisp of a willow who only pulls up her roots to walk.

  “Mommy? There’s somebody in the woods.”

  Rin raises her head, too, trying to hear what Juney hears through the steamy thickness of this new poststorm heat. “Go inside. We’ll bury Hiccup later.”

  Juney knows not to argue. You don’t, not with a soldier alerted to danger. Nestling the kitten into a tattered head of a lettuce, she picks up her cane and, with her feet testing every step, makes her way past the lilac bushes to the house. Closes the door behind her and locks it.

  Rin runs to the barn, grabs her shotgun off its rack over the corncrib, and heads out to the woods. Nobody, but nobody, is allowed near her wolves.

  She sees the boys before they see her, the first tall and acorn-colored, the second white and orange-mopped. She is relieved they are only kids, but she can’t be liable for them leaning their ignorant selves up against her fence or sticking their equally ignorant fingers through it. Especially not now when Gray, Silver, and Ebony are so amped from the storm. So she steps out of the shadows, raises her weapon, and trains it right at the boy in front.

  Tariq’s words stop in his throat, his heart tangling in his ribs, but the rest of him remains peculiarly aloof, as if it has sidled away a moment to busy itself with something else. Flanner, on the other hand, stands locked to the spot behind him, mouth open and stuck there. For a long time, nobody moves.

  The woman holding the gun studies them over the stretch of it. Tariq studies her back. A body solid and square. A cap of short, bristled black hair. A round, sunburned face. Eyes the steel gray of a knife, mouth thin as one. And most intriguing of all, barb-shaped scars pockmarking her arms all the way up to the sleeves of her dark green T-shirt.

  “Can’t you peanuts read?” Her voice is deep and scratchy; the voice of someone who used to smoke but now only coughs.

  Neither boy answers.

  “You.” She jabs the shotgun at Tariq, nearly bumping him in the chest. “You hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes, ma’am what?”

  “Yes, ma’am I can read.”

  “And what do you read on that bigass sign right in front of your nosy little nose?”

  “Uh . . .” Tariq peers around her bulk. “No trespassing?”

  “And what does ‘trespassing’ mean? You.” This time she swivels her gun to Flanner.

  He flinches. “Um. It means can’t go in there?”

  “It means, chowderhead, no walking on other people’s property without their permission. Which is exactly what you are doing. It also means, in this case, not messing with my wolves.”

  “You mean they’re real?” Tariq blurts.

  The woman ignores this. But she does lower the gun at last,
letting it hang by her knees. Her jeans are mud-spattered and baggy, her feet in tan workman’s boots, despite the summer heat. “Lucky you aren’t any bigger or I’d shoot you up good and feed you to Gray and Silver and Ebony over there.”

  The boys strain to see through the fence behind her, which is at least eight feet high and appears to stretch the entire width of the woods. The chance to see actual, live wolves so appeals to their adventure-hungry minds it overpowers any sense of danger. But all they can see is the shadowed darkness between the trees, shot with sunbeams and clouded by gnats.

  “Now scat,” the woman says. “Before I pepper your balls with buckshot.”

  They obey, doing their best to walk, not run, each clinging to his spear, feeling her shotgun boring into their backs. They walk for some time without speaking or looking at each other, kicking aside sodden clumps of leaves and slapping at deerflies, fiercer than ever now the afternoon has reached its height. But eventually, Flanner, who considers himself leader, feels duty-bound to speak.

  “That lady’s crazy. Not just crazy, she’s mean. A mean-ass bitch with a mean-ass mouth.” No one has ever threatened his balls before and he doesn’t know whether to find it horrifying or thrilling.

  “Yeah. But I didn’t believe that stuff about feeding us to her wolves. She was just trying to scare us.”

  Flanner is quiet a moment. “Nah, me neither. Who is she anyhow?”

  “I think she’s the mom of that blind girl.”

  “What blind girl?”

  “You don’t remember that girl in third grade?” The boys have just finished fourth, a world away from the babies in third.

  “Don’t know any blind girl. Don’t want to, either.”

  That closes the conversation, so they walk on in silence. Then Tariq stops. “Where are we?”

  They look around. They have often bragged that they know these woods well enough to find their way out even in the dark. But that was before the storm rerouted every path, downed every landmark tree.

  “Where’s the birch?” Tariq says.

  They look around again. No birch.

  Tariq has known that birch since he and his mother moved to Huntsville their second year in America. He has carved on it, hidden things in it. Peeled off its papery bark and written secret messages on it. He has always felt—and this is private—that the birch is a guardian spirit, a silvery beacon standing at the edge of the woods to point the way home.

  “R.I.P. birch,” Flanner intones.

  “No, I think we’re just lost. We need to go back and ask that mean lady the way.”

  “Are you nuts? She’ll shoot us!”

  “No she won’t. That’s just bluff.” Tariq wants to go back. Not because he really believes he and Flanner are lost—his sense of direction tells him pretty clearly where he is. No, something else is drawing him there, something powerful and strange. “I’m going. You can do what you want.”

  Flanner looks at him. “But we can’t split up! We made a sacred pact never to do that!”

  “It wasn’t sacred. I’m going.”

  “No you’re not! I won’t let you.”

  Tariq turns and starts back along the way they came.

  Flanner watches in disbelief. “Fuck you, cripple leg!” he screams, “Towelhead! Traitor!”

  3

  MOSAIC

  Naema lies in her hospital bed without moving, her face trapped under an oxygen mask, her arms wired to tubes, her mind weaving in and out of memory and dream. Her every breath catches like a sob, the tissues of her lungs as shredded as the plastic bags left clinging to telephone wires by the storm.

  At the moment, she is sewing Tariq’s leg back on, doctor that she is. Needle plunging . . . thread pulling . . . wounds closing . . .

  A mosaic lamp spins petals of color over the whitewashed walls of her home. She keeps sewing.

  Baby Tariq crawls, perfect and whole, across a carpet woven with flowers. She keeps sewing.

  Out in the courtyard, lemons hang as heavy as breasts, while olives hide among their silver leaves, nuggets of powdered green. She threads a new needle.

  The call of the muezzins rise, summoning the faithful to prayer, their voices cracked and splintered by aging loudspeakers. . . . She keeps sewing.

  Khalil moves up to kiss her, calling the prayer with them. His arms embrace her even as the explosion shatters him into a rain of flesh and jelly, blood and bone. . . . She keeps sewing.

  Tariq shocked stiff in her arms, his leg an incomprehensible rag. . . . She chooses a sharper needle.

  Black Hawks throb through the sky, pounding chisel and hammer into her temples. . . .

  The eyes of Syrians black and blank because they are the eyes of strangers. . . .

  The blinding green of the American countryside . . . Tariq digging in a flower bed, the soldier looming over him like a shadow . . .

  She keeps sewing.

  4

  VISITOR

  “I don’t give a damn about your act of God,” Beth Wycombe yells into her phone. “My insurance contract states it right here: Branch falls on it, I get damages.”

  Using her free hand to pull up her hair, dangling heavy as a horse tail in this new wave of heat, she gazes across the lawn at the crushed remains of her husband’s Camaro, which only two days ago was lipstick red and sleek as a fish. “I’m trusting you to look after this baby,” Todd told her before he left. “I don’t want to see a single scratch on her, understand?”

  “Yes, of course that’s what I mean,” she says. “I can’t even move the thing. It looks like a smashed Coke can.” She listens a second, frowning, then slides the phone into her jeans pocket and returns to raking the leaves and branches heaped all over her lawn. Yesterday afternoon, right in the thick of the hurricane, she, Flanner, and Tariq crept up from the basement to peer out of a back window. Trees were whipping from side to side, branches harpooning the air, rain pounding the windows like fists. The valley behind her house, normally a bucolic cup of a meadow, had transformed into a roiling rust-red sea, waves cresting into angry white spumes. “Holy crap,” she whispered, and hustled the boys back down to safety.

  All that has receded now, but what’s left looks like a demolition site; the meadow clotted with mud, yard ankle-deep in tree debris. It’ll take her days and days to clean all this up without Todd here to help. Not that he ever is here to help.

  Flanner comes tramping around the corner, his face set in a sulk, ginger hair studded with burrs. Beth leans the rake against the porch, crosses her arms and watches him, her freckled, button-nosed gangle of a son. “Flanner McAllister, you’re a mess. Where on earth have you been?”

  “No place.” He glances at the remains of his father’s Camaro and trails over to sit on the bottom step of their porch. The porch is painted white, but the rest of the house, inside and out, is the blaring yellow of a daffodil.

  “You went into the woods, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I told you not to, honey. The storm’s weakened the trees and a branch could drop on your head at any moment. It won’t be safe for a while yet.”

  He looks again at the car; the chassis flattened under a log, branches wrapping it like tentacles. The windows littering the ground like shattered ice. “Dad’s gonna be mad as hell.”

  “I know. So let’s not tell him, okay?”

  Flanner nods, bending to scratch his legs, poking white and knobbly out of his desert camouflage shorts. “The bugs are bad today. I’m, like, bitten all over.”

  “Go shower and wash those burrs out of your hair. You’re probably stuck with ticks, too. You should’ve worn long pants. Where’s Tariq?”

  “Gone to see the wolves.”

  “What?”

  “You know those wolves over the hill near Potterstown? He went to see them and that wacko lady over there.”

  “There aren’t any wolves, honey. That’s just stories.”

  Flanner looks at his shoes.

  Beth bends to pee
r into his face. “Are you talking about Mrs. Drummond? Tariq walked all the way to her house?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you let him go by himself?”

  Flanner shrugs.

  “I thought you knew the rule about not leaving each other alone in the woods.” She straightens up. “Remember what Dad always tells you? ‘Never leave a fallen comrade behind. Semper Fi.’”

  “Tariq wasn’t fallen.”

  “I’m ashamed of you, Flan. You should be sticking by poor Tariq after what happened to his mom. Think how upset he must be.”

  Flanner’s mouth presses closed.

  Beth decides to call Louis Martin, her neighbor down the road and one of Todd’s military buddies. Louis knows Naema Jassim better than anybody—he can be the one to rescue her kid.

  He answers on the fifth ring. “You all right after yesterday?” His voice, flat and low, always sounds to her as if it doesn’t want to be talking at all.

  “More or less. A tree fell on Todd’s new car, though. He’s going to kill me. Listen, you got a moment?” She hates asking Louis for favors, even though he promised Todd to help her out when needed—be the man while Todd is running around shooting Afghans. She hates it not only because it makes her look like the very type of helpless woman she least wants to be but because Louis is so difficult to be around, weighted as he is by his history and the town’s suspicions. He’s been like this for six years now, ever since his accomplished young wife astounded everybody by killing herself.

  “Of course. Is there a problem?”

  “Might be. Tariq just walked through the woods to Rin Drummond’s place. By himself.” She frowns again at her son, who examines a scar on his left knee.

  “You sure? That’s not like him.”

  “I know, and I’m worried. Remember what she did last year when she caught that prowler snooping around her property? Shot him right in the butt—”

  “I’ll get him. Last thing Naema needs now is anything happening to Tariq.”