Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  Flanner’s eyes fill, but he says nothing. Head down, he trails across the butter and cream dining room, which Beth dusted and vacuumed and polished for Todd’s homecoming, and soon they hear him stamping up the stairs. A door slams once, then again, louder. Slam, thump. Slam, thump.

  “What the fuck was that about? First the Camaro and now this. Can’t a man come home from war to a little goddamn peace and quiet?”

  “Of course he can,” Beth replies hurriedly, sick with the shock of Flanner’s words. “Don’t listen to him. He’s always testing these days. It’s puberty. It’s creeping up on him now that he’s almost eleven. I think I even glimpsed a little fuzz under his arm the other day.” She is trying to sound jokey, but Todd doesn’t react and he certainly doesn’t smile.

  “Well, you better not be hitting no bottle, not while you’re holding up the home front. I need you to be strong while I’m gone.” He frowns at her. “I need to feel welcome, too.”

  Beth looks at him. Where did he get such talk? He sounds like a movie cowboy. And she wishes he would clean up his language. “Listen honey, why don’t you lie down awhile, relax? Remember how we spoke about this before?”

  The old Todd would have understood, climbed down from whatever hopped-up plane he is on and paid attention. After all, they’ve read the homecoming manuals together, the military spouse websites. They’ve attended the family readiness sessions, too. Beth could quote the advice verbatim if asked: Expect that intimacy and sexual relations may be awkward at first. Go slowly. Your time apart really has made you strangers to each other in many ways. Make an effort to be patient and charming, much as you did when you were first dating.

  But this Todd only stands and stretches with yet another yawn. “Hell with this. I’m going upstairs.”

  At twelve-thirty that night, long after Beth has slid under the covers, careful not to wake him, and long after she has lain there thinking about all the cumulative years they have been apart and how it’s even lonelier to lie beside him like this than to be on her own, she awakes in a black panic, thrashing and gulping for air. Todd is pinning her down on the bed, one knee on her chest, a hand at her throat. And he is hurting her. Yanking violently at her nightgown, making the armholes cut into her as he pulls it off. Pushing her chin back and back until her neck strains to snapping point, his fingers pressing down on her trachea. Her head spinning, vision sparking red and yellow and black . . .

  It is the worst that has ever happened. Worse than anything he has ever done to her. It isn’t even sex, what he does. She pleads with him to stop, tries to push him away, pry herself out from under him and escape. “Todd, I’m Beth, stop!” But the more she pleads and resists, the more vicious he gets, until she gives up, crying silently while he tears and tears at her, all the while sobbing under her breath without even knowing it.

  After he is done and has flung her away from him, she curls up on the far edge of the bed, racked and bleeding and sick with shock, and tries to reach him again. “Todd, don’t be like this, please.”

  He raises himself to an elbow and looms over her, his jaw so tight it looks about to crack. She shrinks away, expecting another blow. But then something passes over his face, a lifting, as of a shadow flitting and gone. He drops onto his back and throws his arm over his eyes.

  “Oh Christ, Beth, fucking Christ.” And he begins to sob.

  15

  ELBOW

  Ever since Juney has been back in school, Rin’s days have turned just as hollow as she feared. She keeps busy enough with all her plenty to do, but an ache walks around with her now, instead of the quietude that accompanies her when she knows Juney is nearby. She feeds her still-unlicensed wolves, deticks the mutts, collects the eggs and apples, milks the nannies, cleans the house and barns, hammers and fixes, digs and weeds, harvests, cooks, and preserves. . . . But it all feels as though she is doing it for nobody at all.

  The ache begins the minute the school bus picks Juney up in the morning and spirits her away to go through who knows what (she will rarely say), bringing her back only after Rin has had way too many hours to fret and imagine. Rin doesn’t believe Juney is being bullied or teased—her classmates are too used to her by now, having grown up with her from the day Rin walked her into kindergarten, clutching her hand as if someone were about to steal her. But she can’t deny that Juney is mostly alone. She will sometimes mention a few friends from her field trips, and one or two kids from class, but her silence about her regular days speaks volumes, as does the fact she’s never invited anywhere. Unless, Rin thinks, that’s because of me.

  Recently, though, the ache has been persisting even when Juney is at home. Rin knows this is largely to do with her dread of Officer Flaherty, but it is also Tariq. He comes to see Juney just about every day after school now, and once they’ve visited the wolves together, they lie on their backs in the living room and talk for hours. Rin assumes they’re telling stories, but she can’t be sure because as soon as Juney hears even one creak of a floorboard under Rin’s feet, she whispers, “Shh,” and they both shut down quiet as thieves till she leaves. Then they do their homework together, Juney with her computer and voice recordings, Tariq with his laptop or old-fashioned workbooks, after which he insists on sticking around even longer to help with the chores, instead of leaving and finally giving Rin some time alone with her daughter. “Don’t you have your own chores to do at home?” she keeps asking. But he never gets the hint. “I’ll do them later,” he tells her, and carries on as if he lives here.

  Juney being away at school all day also forces Rin to cope on her own when she needs to go into town, for even she, with all her self-sufficiency, must shop for supplies once in a while, or visit the braille library to catch up with the latest technology for the blind. She is further obliged to show up at the Department of Vanquished Ambitions and persuade her doctor to check off all the right boxes on all the right forms so she can qualify for the disability checks on which she depends. This entails calling a dozen times to make the appointment and then having to muster the patience of a turtle to get through the ensuing wait. And even when she is granted an appointment, the doc only offers the same solution to her problems every time. Flashbacks? Take a pill. Nightmares? Take another pill. Hallucinations, misanthropy, rage? Take a whole sackful of pills. She throws the dingbat’s prescriptions away as soon as she walks out of there, damned if she’ll let him turn her into another of those zombied-out headcases she sees sad-sagging around his office. All she wants is the money she’s owed and justice. If she could get genuine recognition from the army and its boss, the DoD, Dealers of Death, that they not only sent her to a pissass pointless war but rape-trained the guys she served with and poisoned her daughter, too, then she’s sure a lot of her so-called problems would simply get up and walk away.

  Stop, Rin. Just stop.

  Today she needs to apply for that cursed license, the deadline Flaherty gave her being tomorrow. So, while Juney is still at school, Rin bundles Betty into the backseat, piles her invisible wolves up front, and, heart pressing against her tonsils, drives into Huntsville.

  When she reaches the library, one of those glum federal buildings, redbrick smooth and symmetrical, white cornices like old-man eyebrows, she dresses Betty in her service apron, leaves the invisible wolves in the car, and takes her inside. Librarians don’t normally allow dogs, but they can’t do anything about service and Seeing Eye. It’s the law.

  They know Rin at the Library for the Blind, but they don’t know her here. They don’t know how she walks into a new place. How she stops in the door, Betty a pace ahead on her leash. How she scans each shadow and corner of the room, body shaking, teeth clenched.

  She looks down at Betty. The silly bitch is wagging her tail. She is too damn friendly for a service dog. Gray would be better. He would scare the bejesus out of anyone, ill-intentioned or not.

  It’s a library, Rin. Shape the hell up.

  Rin used to love libraries. In every new town or city her father
dragged her to as a girl, the family bearing one fictitious name after another, she could at least find consistency in its library. The books were reassuringly the same everywhere, of course, but so were the librarians. The lonely young women still pudged with hope and baby fat. The withering divorcées smelling of dust and paper. The aging gay men forever locked in their closets by the small-mindedness of their small towns.

  Betty, who has clearly decided everything is just dandy, wags her way into the room, pulling Rin with her. She looks so matronly in her service apron. If she were human, she’d probably be a librarian herself, one of those elderly, stern types who scold restless children and chase out the pervs jerking off under their raincoats.

  Rin croaks a request for a password and sits at her assigned computer, not having one of her own. Juney is forced to take a laptop to school every day, the trend in the blind world now being to do everything through computers, but Rin refuses to have anything to do with it. She doesn’t like it spying on her. She doesn’t like it leaking the evil of the world right into her own house, either. The news. The ads. Facebook. E-mail.

  Parking Betty beside her, she tells her to lie down. She won’t, insisting on sitting upright instead, snout twitching. But then, she is on guard duty. Rin has to respect that.

  Wishing she had a lead apron to protect her from the computer’s spying eyes, Rin types in “Department of Environmental Conservation/Wolf License” and waits. The first words that hit her are these:

  Illegal to keep wolves as pets.

  She rests her eyes on Betty. Rin saved her wolves. Kept them just as wild as Jay wanted. Spent months studying up on how to raise and doctor them. She has treated them well, and they have returned the favor. And now the Department of Environmental Catastrophe tells her she should never have done any of this at all?

  Betty stands up and licks Rin’s knee. Get back to work.

  Rin returns to the screen and reads the next line. Only exceptions are for three purposes: Scientific, Educational, Exhibition. See Endangered/Threatened Species License.

  Her hope spirals up. Scientific she likes. Endangered, yes, alas.

  Scientific: This tells her she would have to have a project. A grant. A team. Maybe even a degree and a little white coat . . .

  Next.

  Educational: This one says she would have to turn her property into a school. Allow gangs of yapping kids to swarm over her yard, trample her vegetables, snoop in her barn. Sit their little butts down on benches and let them watch her feed her wolves like a clown while they ooh and ahh. . . .

  Next.

  Exhibition: But this one is the worst of all. She’d have to make her home into a zoo, her wolves into specimens. Crowds of strangers—not only kids—would come to laugh at them, show off by posing with them for their endlessly snapping “selfies,” rile them up by howling at them like idiots. . . .

  Rin stares at the screen, hands clammy as jellyfish, the words flying around her like clouds of gnats.

  I can’t do this, Jay. I can’t do any of this at all.

  “What do you see behind your eyes?” Tariq asks Juney while they pick apples after school, Rin back from the library and brooding in the house. He pulls one off a low-slung branch and hands it over. Now that September is halfway through, the trees are licked with the first flames of fall and the apples red and ready.

  Juney runs her fingers over it to feel for wormholes. “This one’s been munched.” She drops it to the ground.

  “I mean, do you see all black? Or white? Or maybe just a kind of invisible color, like air?” He picks another and gives it to her.

  She approves this one and adds it to the others in the wide pockets of her green windbreaker. “Try seeing out of your elbow.”

  He does.

  “It’s like that.” She gropes the bulges around her legs. “I’ve got enough now.” She buttons her jacket, its sides strained and drooping with the weight of the fruit. “I smell winter coming, do you?”

  Tariq sniffs. The strongest scents are grass and the cidery sweetness of decaying apples. But just beyond those, he does catch a new tang in the air, the tang of coming bonfires and ice. “I think so, yeah.”

  “You want to feed some of these to the wolves?”

  “Wolves eat apples?”

  “Of course. They eat all kinds of stuff. Come on.”

  Taking each other’s hands, the children duck under the wizened branches of the trees and make their way to the edge of the woods, Juney tripping twice, Tariq catching her. She giggles. “I do this better with my cane,” she tells him.

  Once they reach the fence, she raises her face and again cries out her skin-prickling wolf-call, so startling a chipmunk it darts away with a shriek.

  The wolves run up in no time, eager as always to feed, although not as frenzied as when they scented Rin’s squirrels. Soon they are rubbing their ribs and heads against the wire, ears pricked, tongues out, faces ardent. Tariq’s chest opens in a bloom of love. Now that winter is closing in, their coats are thickening, rendering the wolves more majestic than ever. Ebony’s coat is showing a new touch of silver at the tips, as if he has been brushed by stars. Silver’s is growing whiter and bushier by the day. And Gray’s coat, patterned in black and white and charcoal, with the bold stripe of the alpha running over his shoulders and along his spine, is so thick that were Tariq to sink his hand into it, it would disappear to the wrist.

  Tariq squeezes his eyes shut and tries again to see out of his elbow, concentrating on the wolves this time. And finally, he understands what Juney was trying to tell him. Just as she will never see what he sees, he will never see what she doesn’t.

  She pulls an apple from her pocket, the size of a grapefruit in her little hand, and gives it to him. Her cheeks are pinker than usual, flushed by the new crispness in the air, her hair a loose spill of sunlight down her back. “Throw it over the fence.”

  “You sure?” He assumed they would push it through the same hatch Rin had used for the squirrels.

  “Yes. Go on.”

  He steadies himself on his false leg and, with his best baseball pitch, lobs the apple over the wire. Instantly, Silver leaps up so high she catches it in midair. He gasps. “Silver’s an acrobat!”

  “Quick, throw the next one and tell me what they do.”

  He throws another, this one snapped up with equal alacrity by Gray. “They jump from just standing and spring way up above my head!”

  “Do it again.”

  He lobs a third apple over. “Ebony did it, too. Higher than ever!”

  “Do it some more.”

  He does, again and again, the wolves leaping and snatching, never missing once.

  “They’re flying, aren’t they?” Juney says happily. “You made the wolves fly!”

  At home with his mother that evening, Tariq finishes the last of his schoolwork and settles onto his bed to read more of White Fang, disappointed with it though he is. He chose the book because he wanted to learn how Gray and Silver and Ebony think and feel—to learn about their souls—something none of the articles he has found online have told him. But the deeper he reads into the novel, the more he finds that its wolves don’t think or feel at all. They are no more than bundles of instincts and rote behaviors, living out the brutal laws of kill or be killed and oppress the weak and obey the strong. They don’t even express any loyalty, aside from mother to pup, and that only lasts a month or two. Even White Fang himself fails to feel anything beyond anger, fear, pain, and hunger. He certainly possesses nothing like what Tariq would call a soul.

  He closes the book over his thumb and studies the cover, an old-fashioned illustration of a scrawny black wolf baring its fangs. This book is all wrong. This isn’t what wolves are like—it isn’t even what they look like. When he gazes into Gray’s amber eyes, he sees much more than raw instinct and aggression. He sees a rich and complicated being in there, a being with whom he can speak his secret language, boy to wolf, wolf to boy.

  “Hey, sous-chef, y
ou ready to make the salad?”

  It’s Louis, knocking on his door. He has come to dinner with the understanding that Tariq will help him cook, neither of them wanting to make Naema work.

  “Sure.” Tariq throws White Fang aside and pulls on his leg.

  While he and Louis maneuver deftly about the compact, white-tiled kitchen, Naema sits at a tiny round table in the corner, her hands resting with uncharacteristic docility in her lap, watching them with affection. Louis has been making dinner with them for so many years he knows this kitchen as well as his own, and Tariq is equally practiced at dodging around him, trying as always to disguise any awkwardness in his step. It pains Naema to see the effort her son puts into defying his disablement. Even when he was small and had to rely on heavy wooden crutches to move, he taught himself to swing on them faster than his friends could walk and to cast one aside to race across the ground with the swooping motion of a finch in flight. In the rough streets of Damascus, he also learned to use a crutch as a weapon. But even so, he has never been able to shield himself entirely from those who look at him with pity, treat him as incapable or, most cruel of all, as an aberration. How she wishes her leg had been torn off rather than his; how she wishes she could absorb all his suffering.

  “You think I should use these onions?” Louis asks her, gesturing to the vegetable basket by the sink. “They look kind of shriveled.”

  She pulls her eyes from Tariq. “They will be fine once they are cooked.” She pauses to seek a breath. “I have some good news to tell you, Louis. I telephoned Children’s Hospital yesterday and they said I can go back to working in the emergency room. I begin next week. So now we can celebrate that I am a doctor again instead of a patient, yes?”

  He turns to examine her face, lovely as ever but still drained by illness. “You sure you should go back to work so soon? Maybe you shouldn’t push yourself yet. Lungs are delicate.”

  “I must earn a living, no?”