Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  “You did? I thought they were just a story.”

  “Oh no.” Tariq smiles to himself, a secret warming his insides like a swallow of hot chocolate. One of the wolves, the biggest one, the one Juney said was named Gray, walked right up to the fence and stared at him. Stared so hard his eyes shimmered like melting gold. He didn’t seem fierce or frightening. He seemed like a big, friendly dog. No, Tariq corrects himself, he seemed like what he was—a wild, majestic, beautiful beast. But best of all—and this Tariq will never tell anyone, not even Louis—he seemed about to speak.

  Louis has never seen a wolf in his life and is pretty sure Tariq hasn’t, either. All he saw, no doubt, was a dog and a wish. But Louis has seen war-warped vets before. “Well, you better stay away from that place, wolves or no wolves. That woman is not cool.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Oh yeah? What about her little girl, is she ‘fine,’ too? Imagine having a mom like that.”

  Tariq returns his gaze to the window. He refuses to talk about Juney. Talking about Juney would be like spilling oil into a perfectly clear, crystalline pond.

  When they reach Louis’s house, a two-story beige clapboard just down the hill from Beth’s, Louis switches off his engine and turns to Tariq. “Listen, bud, I asked at the hospital if you can visit your mom today, but I’m afraid they said it’s still too early. You will be able to soon, though, I promise.” He can’t bring himself to add more, the details Wendy Fitch told him too raw in his mind. How she was hurrying the patients out of the collapsing clinic when she saw a white coat floating by like a great lily, a tangle of black hair straggled across it. How she had taken a moment to realize Naema was inside that coat, face down. How she had waded back into the flood, the water snatching at her knees, to seize Naema under the arms, haul her up to dry ground and give her CPR. How it had taken the ambulance forever to get to them through the floodwaters, Naema lying there with a stillness you rarely see in the living.

  Tariq and Louis climb out and stand in silence a moment, gazing at the shambles the hurricane made of Louis’s home. The right corner of the roof is dangling like a dislodged eyebrow. The roof itself is covered in bald patches, the wind having ripped off a number of shingles. An upstairs window is punched in and gaping. The whole place looks as if it’s been in a fight.

  “Where’s the linden?” Tariq spins about as if to catch it sneaking off somewhere. The huge, fan-shaped tree has always towered over the house like a benevolent giant. Tariq has daydreamed and read under it for years, climbed its branches, collected its seeds and sent them twirling all over the garden like tiny helicopters. Now all that’s left of it is a ragged hole in the earth, like a wound. “What happened to it?”

  Louis rests a hand on his head. “I’m afraid it got knocked over by the wind. I had to have it hauled away.” He glances at Tariq. “Shame, I know, but it was too close to the house to be safe anyhow. Come see what I found on my deck.”

  He leads him around the back, where a branch as wide as three boys holding hands in a circle has dropped across the deck floor, splintering the planks beneath. Resting on top of it is a bright green garage door.

  “Whoa, whose door is that?”

  “No idea. My deck furniture blew away, too. Probably sitting on somebody’s roof.”

  “But how are you going to fix all this?” Tariq lifts his face to Louis. “I mean, it’s so . . .” His lips pinch tight, his brow drawing into a cluster of little lumps. He looks exhausted, dark patches under his eyes. Louis, too, cannot sleep out of fear for Naema.

  He slips his arm around Tariq’s narrow ledge of a shoulder. “You want to stay with me while your mom’s away? You don’t have to go back to Flanner’s or camp if you don’t feel like it. You can come to work with me, help keep the store in order.”

  “I can?”

  “Of course. Your mom’ll be all right, you’ll see. Just hang in there, okay?”

  Tariq keeps his gaze on Louis. But he doesn’t say a word.

  5

  MAGHRIB

  Naema is gathering laundry on the roof of her house in Baghdad, a basket at her feet, a black sheet slapping her face. She reaches up to pluck the pieces from the line: strips of flesh, a burqa, her mother-in-law’s shroud. Folding them one by one, she places them in the basket, where they squirm and settle like sleeping goslings. They hold the warmth of the sun still, even as the air is cooling, and they smell of dust and death.

  “The stench of death permeates every crevice of a city at war,” she remarks to a vulture flying by, its talons gripping Tariq’s severed leg. “I can smell it even on my own tongue.”

  An explosion in the distance strikes through her chest, startling the pigeons on the roof next door into flight. Rising with them, she and the birds wheel and dip in circles, as if trying to escape an invisible tether, the flap of their wings sounding like applause. Around and around they fly, over the jumble of flat, sand-colored rooftops and spindly minarets of her doomed city; under the sun caught in a snarl of telephone wires. Her hair streams behind her like a net, trapping the pigeons, binding their wings. Shrieking, they drive their beaks into her eyes. She plummets into the basket with a thud.

  “Mama?” Tariq runs over, his curls dancing behind him like a cloud of midges. “Play with me?” He tugs at her skirt, the black of it coming off on his hands.

  The sun dips behind the roofs, turning the sky a blood-streaked gold as the muezzins once again take up their call to Maghrib, their voices curling into her like hooks. Soon the curfew will begin, when nobody but a soldier is allowed on the streets and Baghdad sinks into dark and sinister emptiness. She peers over the roof’s edge. Her husband, Khalil, is out there somewhere, perhaps alone, perhaps with soldiers. Perhaps already a ghost.

  “Here,” she says to Tariq. “Help me pair up Baba’s socks.”

  “But they’re all the same, Mama. They’re all black. And they don’t have Baba’s feet in them.” He takes off his leg and puts a sock on it.

  “No, no, you still have your leg. Put it back on.”

  He does, but he puts it on backward, the foot pointing behind him. She squats beside him and tries to fix it, twisting and pulling until it begins to bleed.

  “Stop, Mama, stop!” he cries. “It hurts!”

  A nurse adjusts the mask over Naema’s nose and mouth. “Shh,” she whispers. “It’s all right now. Go back to sleep.” She checks the IV drip and turns off the lights.

  6

  HOPE

  Beth and Louis lean on their rakes in the shadows of her front yard, catching their breath as the dusk purples around them. All afternoon, they’ve been hauling branches off her roof and sawing up the maple crushing the Camaro. Now, Louis’s green T-shirt is patched with sweat and Beth’s long ponytail is sticking to her back, her bare legs damp and scratched.

  “Want to come in for a drink?” she says. “You’ve earned it.”

  He glances at his watch. The hospital’s evening visiting hours begin in fifty minutes. “Just a quick one. But sure, thanks.”

  She rubs the back of a knee with her foot. “Shit. Mosquitoes. Let’s go.”

  Inside, she directs him to the ground-floor bathroom and climbs the stairs to another. His is narrow and tubular and just as yellow as the rest of the house: curtains bright as lemons, matching towels, gold faucets. Soap the shape and color of a bee. He wonders if Todd had anything to do with all this.

  He washes his hands and face and joins her in her large and equally yellow kitchen. “Sit,” she says, pointing to a chair at the table, which is at least white. “Bourbon good?” She hefts a liter of Old Crow down from a cabinet, along with two heavy-bottomed highball glasses. “Ice?”

  “That’d be great.”

  She pours them each a large slug and hands his over, emptying hers in a series of quick gulps. Refilling it, she takes a seat across from him, kicks off her sneakers, and props her feet up on the table. Her toenails are painted the same glossy gold as her faucets, and her cutoff shorts a
re very short indeed. Louis is not quite sure what to make of Beth, but he has to admit she’s attractive. Small, and still lithe from her years as a dancer. Eyes the blue of jay feathers, face as tidy as a doll’s. Hair a thick and wavy auburn. She’s just a little frayed around the edges, that’s all. Only thirty-four, his own age, yet lines are already scratched around those eyes and across her forehead. But then, as his wife used to say, waiting day and night for that death knock on the door could age even an angel.

  “To never having to spend another Saturday like this again.” Beth raises her drink with a weary smile. “Thanks for all your help, though. Really.”

  He shrugs.

  “Mind if I ask you something?” She lowers her husky voice to a near whisper. Flanner is upstairs, getting ready for bed, but she doesn’t want to risk him overhearing. “Has Tariq said anything to you about why he hasn’t shown up here all week?”

  Louis knocks back the rest of his bourbon. He can’t very well tell her that Tariq refused to come even today, insisting on staying with a neighbor instead. So all he offers is another shrug.

  This annoys Beth. She finds Louis annoying in quite a few ways—his tendency to drift off when she’s talking to him, the reticence he wraps around himself like a coat. Ever since he and his wife moved here some eight years ago, he has been the object of gossip in town, yet he talks so little about himself nobody is even sure where he’s from. They do know he served in Iraq at least three times. They also know he was deeply in love with his wife, Melody Long, a young woman from Albany rumored to have been half black, or maybe Hispanic, as Beth guesses he might be—a woman who seemed fine until she wasn’t. But what nobody knows is why she killed herself or what, if anything, he had to do with it.

  “I mean,” Beth says, “one minute Tariq was staying with us; then he suddenly moves to your house, and now he hasn’t come over since. Is he mad at Flanner or something?”

  Louis checks his watch again. “I think he’s too upset about his mom to see anyone. It’s nothing to do with Flanner, I’m sure.”

  Beth puts down her glass, unconvinced, but decides not to push it. “I can’t believe that happened to Naema. Poor Tariq, he must be so scared. Some people get nothing but trouble, you know?” Gathering up her ponytail in both hands, she pulls it apart like wings to tighten it. “Damn this heat. My hair feels like a rug.”

  Rising, she walks over and cranks open the window above the sink, admitting a waft of viscous air, along with the pulse of crickets and fricative snores of cicadas. She gazes through the insect screen, its mesh blurring her view of the twilit lawn beyond, thinking of her own troubles. Raising a child by herself. Working a dead-end job selling clothes and teaching dance at a boutique with the humiliating name of DanceHi. Todd’s Camaro crushed in the driveway.

  Returning to her chair, she picks up her glass and drains it, while Louis sits across from her, off in one of his dazes again. She takes the opportunity to study him, tall, lean, and muscled as he is. High-boned face. Black hair short and tight with curls. That coppery-bronze skin she can’t quite place on the racial scale. His eyes are so intensely green that every time he raises them to her, she feels a little shock.

  “Did you actually meet that Drummond woman the other day?” she asks to break the silence.

  No answer.

  “Louis?”

  He glances at her. “What? Oh. Yeah, kind of.” His skin pricks at the memory.

  “She as loony as everyone says?”

  “She’s got a bad case of nerves, that’s all.” Realizing this sounds like a reprimand, he tries to lighten his tone. “Tariq told me she keeps wolves.” He raises his eyebrows.

  “Yeah, Flanner said something about that. You think it could be true?”

  “’Course not. The kids are just playing.”

  She stands again, picking up the bourbon bottle and pointing its bottom at him. “Another?”

  “No thanks, I need to go.”

  Ignoring this, she presses fresh ice cubes into both their glasses with a series of loud thunks. “Well, if those wolves are real, I sure hope she’s got them caged up.”

  She pours them each half a glass more and slides his over. Sitting back down, she takes another long swallow, trying to avoid the sight of Louis’s right hand cupped around his drink, the middle and ring fingers having been torn off during his last tour in ’08. The stubs are purple and scarred and he is usually more careful to keep them out of sight, stuffed into a pocket or tucked under a folded arm, his thumb curling around them in a self-conscious twist. She glances at his face, his eyes fixed once more on the table, and wonders again about Melody.

  Upstairs, Flanner is sitting against his pillows, playing a video game on his laptop. In the game, the bad guys are green skeletons and the good guy a soldier in desert camouflage. If Flanner can get his hero to beat the skeletons, he’ll let himself go to sleep, and, so far, he’s winning. But then his eyes drift to the window, attracted by the moon peering through the blinds, and when he looks back, three skeletons have piled on top of the soldier and are busy whacking him in the head.

  Flanner groans and hunches over, his fingers hammering the keyboard. He tries to make the soldier get back to his feet, whirl and kick and fire the humungous machine gun right there in his arms. But the skeletons are creaming him now, along with a swarm of flying screws who have appeared out of nowhere and won’t stop pecking holes in his face. The soldier is rapidly weakening, points sliding. Flanner makes him stand up but he only crashes back down again, his weapon disintegrating into pixilated fragments. “No!” Flanner shouts. “No, get up!”

  “What’s the matter, honey?”

  The door swings open, revealing his mother silhouetted against the hallway light. “Are you playing with that thing again?” Her words sound runny. She marches over and snatches up the laptop, glancing at the frozen image on the screen: a pile of green skeletons flailing at the corpse of a soldier.

  “What is this?”

  “Nothing.” Flanner’s voice quavers.

  “Oh, Flan.” She sits down on the bed and closes the lid. “You shouldn’t play games like this. I told you. Come here.”

  For a moment, he allows himself to sink into her soft comfort, a luxury he usually rejects these days. But just as he is snuggling into her chest, her breath reaches him. He jerks up and pushes her away. “Leave me alone!”

  She stands, clasping the laptop to her stomach. “Get into your pj’s, honey.” And she creeps out of the room.

  Down in the kitchen, Louis is pacing the floor, waiting for Beth to return so he can say good-bye. He only hopes he is sober enough to drive. He poured the remains of his second bourbon down the sink the minute she went upstairs, but even so he feels unsteady. Normally, he never touches anything stronger than beer, not anymore; not since his first year out of the army, the memories rushing at him like a train.

  Beth appears at last, clutching a laptop and looking stricken. “Shit.” She drops into a chair. “It wasn’t one of his nightmares. Look.” She puts the laptop on the table and pushes it over.

  Louis lifts the lid. One glance at the image—the soldier in DCUs, the skeletons—and his guts clamp. He closes it quickly.

  “Take it,” she says, the words slipping into one another. “I don’t want that damn thing in this house.”

  He picks up the computer, which dangles like a toy in his big hand, and nestles it into the dust on top of the refrigerator. “I’ll leave it here.” He backs toward the door. “You’ll be all right?”

  She looks at him with a crumpled smile, her hair straggling across her face. “Oh yes. Strong little military wifey, that’s me.”

  When he reaches the hospital some forty minutes later, Louis squeezes onto an elevator with a crowd of other visibly anxious visitors and hurries to Naema’s room, only to find the door firmly closed. He knocks, worried he has come too late, and waits for some time. Finally, a tall, broad-shouldered nurse opens it and nods in weary recognition, her eyes as darken
ed with fatigue as Tariq’s.

  “Any change?” Louis whispers.

  “I think she’s breathing a little easier. Come see.” She takes him inside, past an empty bed and over to a set of blackish-green drapes. “I’m afraid you can’t stay long. Visiting hours end in ten minutes.” Swishing open the curtains, she hurries away.

  Louis steps over and gazes down at Naema’s sleeping face, half obscured by her mask. Her eyelids are the color of bruised petals, her wrists punctured with tubes. Her skin has turned waxen. Only her hair, thick, black and full, looks itself, spread in disarray over the pillow.

  He leans over her. “Breathe,” he whispers. “Please, breathe.”

  Drawing a chair up to the bed, he clasps her cold hands in his and kisses them—something he would never dare do were she awake—his eyes on the rise and fall of her chest. Every day since the hurricane, he has come before and after work to watch over her like this, the dread heavy within him. He cannot imagine what he would do if he lost her, how he would make it from one day to the next.

  He first came across her four years ago at the government’s Refugee Center in Albany, where he had been volunteering in the hope of palliating the rot inside him planted by war and Melody’s suicide two years earlier. The center had made him a chauffeur, explaining that several hundred Iraqi refugees had been settled in the area, most in need of jobs and all lacking a car. One morning, he was assigned an interpreter’s widow who had come to the United States with her mother-in-law and child. They had been staying with their sponsor, he was told, a soldier for whom her husband had translated in Iraq, but something had gone wrong, and now Louis was to help them find a home of their own.

  “I was expecting a woman,” Naema said in accented but near perfect English when they were introduced, and turned her eyes away. Taking in the tightness of her lips, the white star on her cheek, he hoped she would never learn he had been a soldier, too.