Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  “I suppose.”

  “Come, don’t look so worried. You should see your expression, all crumpled and scowling.” Chuckling, she reaches up to pin her hair in a haphazard bun, the grace of her movement making him catch his breath. Patting her hair to make sure it holds—it is so long and heavy it tends to fall out of any clasp she can find—she folds her hands again in her lap. “See? I am being quiet, just as you wish.” She smiles as only she can, warmly and with humor, but with the unmistakable message that he better cease meddling, and cease now.

  Once dinner is ready, Tariq dims the lights and they sit at the dining room table, which Naema has decorated with a red silk cloth and matching candles. She takes the head, Tariq and Louis on either side of her, and serves them each the halal burgers Louis made and a helping of Tariq’s salad.

  “A toast to your being a doctor again,” Louis says, eager to make up for his earlier tactlessness, although he is far from happy about her news. He lifts his glass of cranberry juice to her. Even after her four years in America, and even though Naema’s faith is more private than traditional, she maintains her ban of alcohol in the house.

  She raises her own glass. “Thank you. But I am going to miss my clinic patients very much.”

  “Why? Their parents were so nasty to you.”

  “True. But you know how much I care about working with children hurt by war. There, at least I could do that. And children are not responsible for what their parents choose to do.” She twists her glass around on the tabletop with her long fingers, watching the candlelight blaze over its beveled surface. “Anyway, the last time I worked at the hospital, my colleagues were hardly more polite.” She glances at Tariq and says no more.

  “Well, perhaps they’ll treat you better this time. After all, you were only a resident then, and now you’re nearly a full physician.” Louis is phrasing this as carefully as he can, knowing how hard Naema worked to complete the training and residencies required to qualify here, her degrees and achievements as a doctor in Iraq counting for nothing.

  “If I had stayed home, I could have helped so much more,” she murmurs, as if talking to herself. “Only a handful of my colleagues had the courage to stay. I wish I had been one of them.”

  “No, Mama!” Tariq looks at her anxiously. “Then you would have been killed and I’d be an orphan!”

  She doesn’t answer him at first, still wrapped inside her thoughts. But then she reaches out to stroke his face. “Perhaps you are right, little one. I am sorry.”

  Louis’s cell phone buzzes just then, startling them all. He pulls it from his pocket. “It’s Beth,” he says in surprise.

  “Answer, I do not mind,” Naema tells him. “We cannot talk over that thing droning like a bee anyway.”

  “Can you hear me?” Beth whispers when he does. “I can’t speak any louder.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I need you to come. . . .” Her voice is shaking. “Todd . . . he’s not . . .” She falls silent.

  “Beth? What’s going on? Beth?” But she’s gone.

  “What is the matter?” Naema asks.

  “I don’t know.” Louis hesitates before pushing back from the table. “I hate to leave in the middle of dinner like this, but I think I better go see. It sounds bad.”

  “Of course. Go, go. And if I can do anything, tell me.” Naema rises to bid him good-bye Iraqi-style, with a kiss on each cheek and a press of both hands. She does not hesitate to touch the stubs of his missing fingers, as so many do, and if he presses back a little too fervently for a little too long, she never seems to notice. Still, he wishes he had a second self, a shadow self he could leave behind to watch over her.

  16

  HOODLUMS

  On the way to Beth’s house, a mere twenty-minute drive up the hill, Louis tries to prepare himself for whatever he might find there. He doesn’t much care for Todd McAllister, or his chameleonlike eagerness to conform to whomever his companions want him to be, but he tries to retain what empathy he can for the man. After all, he knows something of what Todd is going through, just as he knows that coming home for two weeks while your redeployment shadows you like an assassin is enough to unglue anybody, even a gung-ho marine. He also knows who bears the brunt of this arrangement: the parents, the spouse, the children, anyone you’ve taught to love you.

  He pulls into Beth’s driveway and parks by the now-lopsided maple tree in the spot once occupied by Todd’s Camaro. Turning off the engine, he gazes for a moment at the gaudy yellow house, its white porch fringed with latticework as intricate as lace. He pries the car key off its ring, slots it back into the ignition, and climbs out.

  Flanner opens the door the instant he knocks, his ginger hair flaring in the early-evening light, eyes avid. Louis guesses he’s hoping to see Tariq.

  “Hey there, Flan. Your parents home?”

  The boy nods and stands there, not making a move. Louis studies his face. “Want to tell them I’m here?”

  “Tell ’em yourself.” Squeezing past him, Flanner runs outside and around the corner, Louis gazing after him. Flanner is usually polite to adults, in that crisply disciplined way military kids are so often polite.

  “Todd? Beth?” Louis steps into the sun-yellow hallway. “Can I come in?”

  “Oh, hey, bro.” Todd appears holding an open beer bottle. Louis is struck by how drawn he is; skin dry and tight, cheeks so hollow the bones look like little wings. Only his arms, bare and tattooed beneath his green T-shirt sleeves, are as bulked as ever. He has aged a decade since he was last home.

  Todd raises the bottle. “Want some?” He is clearly half-plotzed, even though it’s barely past six.

  “Maybe later. So, welcome back. What’ve you got left now, a week?” They bump fists, slam shoulders.

  “Less—been nine days already. I was wondering when you were gonna show up.” Todd takes a swig. “Hey, Beth,” he yells up the stairs. “Come down here! We got a visitor.”

  As soon as she appears, Louis knows. She is wearing sunglasses and a pink scarf around her neck and he can see rows of little blue circles imprinted on her arms. His hands clench. She flashes him a look of warning. “Want something to drink?” She leads him into the kitchen and opens the fridge.

  “Yeah, take that beer you said no to before,” Todd insists, coming up behind him. “It’s stuffy as a dog’s asshole in here. Beth, open some windows.”

  “You said not to.”

  “So now I’m saying different.”

  She pulls out a bottle of German beer and twists off its top. When she gives it to Louis, he sees that her hand is shaking. He turns his back to Todd and mouths “CAR,” shifting his eyes to the front window. Aloud, he says, “I saw Flanner just now. Kid’s taller every time I look. He scooted out the door mighty fast.”

  “I’ll get him—he needs a shower before dinner.” Beth hurries outside and Louis knows she’s read him.

  “Let’s sit on your deck,” he says to Todd, standing to block the window. “I like it out there—great view of the mountains you got.”

  “Nah. Too cold.”

  “Come on. There’s a warm breeze—I felt it on the way here.”

  Todd shrugs, extracts another beer from the fridge, and follows Louis out. They each take a lounge chair and kick their feet up on the railing, facing the meadow and the distant humps of the Helderbergs, which look misty and insubstantial in the evening light, more like billows of lavender smoke than mountains.

  “You should’ve seen that meadow of yours out there in the storm,” Louis says in a near shout. “Did Beth tell you? Said it was like an ocean. Waves. Whitecaps even.”

  Todd frowns. “What’re you blathering about, Martin? And pipe the fuck down. I’m not deaf.”

  Louis lowers his voice, but only a little. “Never mind. So how’s it feel being home?”

  Pause. “Ah, y’know. Seeing my boy’s good. Food, too. Sometimes. Beth ain’t much of a cook, really. But on the whole, yeah, it’s bullshit.”
>
  “Know what you mean. I used to look forward to coming home like a kid waiting on Christmas. Counted the days. Got here. Counted the days to go back.”

  Todd nods, lids drooping, eyes glassy, but he doesn’t reply. Louis hears his car driving away up the hill.

  They sit in silence a long moment after that, Louis relieved, Todd staring out at the sleepy meadow beyond. Leaning forward, Louis rolls his beer bottle between his hands, his phantom fingers sensing the cold glass with their own aching memory. He decides to take a gamble.

  “Listen, bro, be careful with Beth, okay? Treat her right. She’s a good person, real loyal to you.”

  Todd gives him a grip-jawed glare. “What the fuck do you know about how to treat women? Didn’t do so good with your own, did you?”

  Louis jerks his head back as if he’s been pistol-whipped. He takes a long slow breath, summoning the self-restraint he’s practiced for years. “You can say whatever you want, but I never hit her, never left bruises all over her. I saw what I saw just now.”

  “You fucking my wife, Martin? That why you’re so concerned?”

  Louis raises his eyebrows. “Don’t be an asshole. I’ve got eyes in my head, that’s all. Look, I know you’ve been through shit; it’s written all over you. But you can’t take it out on Beth or Flanner. They’re innocent. Don’t add to your crimes, man. You hear me?”

  Louis braces himself for a fight even as he’s speaking. He grips his bottle and a scene flashes through his mind of the two of them going at it with jagged glass, slashing at each other like street hoodlums. Todd might be built like a fullback with a body pumped with Marine muscle, but Louis is big, too, and just as combat-weathered, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to be afraid of someone as obviously war-fucked as Todd McAllister.

  But Todd doesn’t fight. Todd doesn’t even argue. He only blinks at Louis with the helpless eyes of a wounded dog. “You got me all wrong, Martin,” he mumbles, and he slowly folds over his knees and drops his head into his hands, his beer dribbling splash by splash to the deck floor.

  Setting a CD player on the windowsill above her kitchen sink, Naema inserts one of the discs of Iraqi oud music Hibah brought with her to America. Hibah had never been easy to live with, demanding and irascible as she was, but were it not for her help with Tariq, Naema has no idea how she would have survived their life in Damascus or her years of working for her medical degree here. “Cast no dirt into the well that gives you water,” Hibah would admonish when Naema complained about their dependence on Sergeant Donnell. “One hand cannot clap by itself,” she scolded when Naema insisted on breaking free of him. No, Hibah was not easy, but even so it is only now, a year after her death, that Naema is able to listen again to the oud’s rippling notes without her heart contracting in sorrow or her mind turning to the dark side of her memories.

  Tariq wishes she wouldn’t play the music at all. The slow songs make him ache and the fast ones agitate something deep within him he does not even want to understand. He prefers the Rihanna and Kanye West his friends play at school. Still, he puts up with the oud for his mother’s sake, just as he once did for his grandmother’s.

  He and Naema are cleaning up after the meal Louis had to abandon, she by washing the delicate dishes, he by carrying the heavy ones in from the dining room. Neither is in the mood to talk, Naema needing to save her breath, Tariq too full of thoughts of Gray, so they are content to remain silent, lifting their heads now and then to gaze through the window at the evening sky flaring from salmon to smoky blue.

  When her cell phone leaps to life on the corner table, she reaches over to turn the music off. “See who it is, will you? If it’s Mustapha, I won’t answer.”

  “You know he’ll call back a zillion times till you do.”

  “True. You want to tell him I’m out?”

  “That won’t work, Mama. You can’t be out with cell phones.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Were she not a doctor, she would throw the tiresome device away.

  Tariq hands her the still-ringing phone, and seeing the caller is indeed Mustapha, she carries it with resignation to the living room sofa and lies down to catch her breath. She refuses to pity herself for what happened in the hurricane, but she does wish her lungs would allow her to breathe freely again. They feel as clogged as if she had been smoking for years. In medical school, she spent an entire week dissecting the lungs of smokers, which were riddled with oozing tar as thick and black as that used to build roads, and once she squeezed a pair to see what would happen. Instead of springing back like a sponge as healthy lungs would, they stuck together like a wet and shriveled balloon. This is how she pictures her lungs now: two wads of gluey black rubber.

  “Mustapha, salaam,” she says in Arabic, her voice weary.

  “You sound worse than usual. Have you been overdoing it again?”

  This irritates her. “If you believe that eating dinner, standing up, and sitting back down is overdoing it, perhaps I have.”

  “I’m sorry. It must be so frustrating.”

  “How is Saba?” She would rather talk about his elder sister, a widow and mother like her, than hear his overbearing, solicitous tones. He behaved like this each time he came to see her in the hospital, too, telling her what she could and couldn’t do until she was forced to send him away. Louis is never like that—or almost never. He knows her too well.

  “She’s fine and sends you her wishes. But may I come by? I have something for you.”

  “I’m very tired, Mustapha.”

  “I won’t stay long. Has . . . has Louis Martin been to see you today?” Mustapha’s jealousy is so manifest, Naema is embarrassed for him. The two men often cross paths on her doorstep, eyeing each other like rival dogs.

  “Yes, he just left. And yes, I suppose you can come.”

  Mustapha does come, and so quickly she suspects he called from around the corner. Tariq opens the door for him, sullen in a way he is with no one else. He runs down the hall to his bedroom before Mustapha even has his shoes off.

  When Mustapha is in her presence, though, sitting on an armchair and leaning toward her in concern, his square face and thick shoulders exuding reassurance, she wonders why she is so hard on him. Ever since they met at the Refugee Center during her first month in America, he has never been anything but kind to her. And she admires the way he refuses to complain, either about all he suffered in Iraq or his life here, where he works in a factory making window shades, and keeps applying over and over for more suitable work he never gets—he, who was an accomplished engineer at home. Yet, whenever she is near him, she feels buried under stones.

  “Here,” he says, once he has finished interrogating her about her health. He pulls a packet the size and shape of a pencil box out of his pocket and hands it to her. “May Allah the Gracious and Merciful wash away the sorrow with the sweet.”

  She opens it to find a double row of plump Iraqi dates. “Where did you get these?” she asks in delight. “The only dates I can find here are all hard and dry as toes.”

  He smiles. “My mother brought them back from Baghdad last winter.”

  “She was able to visit home safely?”

  “She was, Alhamdulillah. Although I doubt she would dare now.”

  Naema’s mouth fills with a taste as bitter as brass. “Yes, and I thought our home could get no worse after the Americans.”

  Mustapha shakes his head. “We have no home, Naema. It has been parceled out between the corrupt and the fanatic. There is no Iraq, not as we knew it.”

  Naema has said this often enough herself, yet the old yearning tugs at her like a hungry child. Nearly seven years have passed since she last saw Baghdad—how she longs to go back! But this is impossible, not only because of the newest wave of thuggery and extremism, the Syrian civil war and floods of refugees in and out of Iraq, but because, as the widow of an interpreter, she might still be marked for death. And then, even if she could return, whom would she find there? Her father and thirteen-
year-old brother, who had opposed Saddam and yet were arrested by the Americans anyway, were killed in Camp Bucca, a U.S. prison made of nothing but tents and razor wire in the middle of the desert. Khalil was blown up by one militia or another—nobody knew which. And even her mother, who survived all that, died of heartbreak soon after Naema was forced to leave her behind by the rules of her American visa. Most of her other relatives are gone as well, the Sunnis from her father’s side hunted down or exiled, only to find themselves shunted from one war to another; the Shia from her mother’s killed or scattered to live the marginal lives of refugees everywhere.

  “I wish I could go home like your mother,” she says to Mustapha. “But if I did, it would be only to visit graves.”

  Louis gazes out at the shadowy row of the Helderbergs, watching the remains of the same salmon sunset Naema and Tariq were admiring while he waits for Todd to get a grip on himself. Out in the meadow, three cinnamon deer lift their heads of one accord, alerted by a sound he cannot hear, and bound away in alarm. A crowd of goldfinches, bright as butter, loops over his head to bed down in a tree. A chipmunk emerges from the tall grass behind Beth’s bird feeder, clambers up the pole with the furtive speed of a practiced thief, and stuffs its pouch with seed. Only when the sun has stretched the last of its light over the land, glazing it in a gilded haze, does Todd finally lower his hand and right his dripping beer bottle.

  Louis turns his eyes back to him, this bulk of a man still slumped over his knees, thick neck bowed. The veins in his muscled arms are knotted and blue, and his older tattoos—the rifles, the Stars and Stripes, the Nirvana face—are already blurring at the edges; memories sliding out of focus.

  “You okay?”

  No answer.

  Louis tries again. “You got five days left, you said?”

  Todd grunts without moving, his scalp exposed and fragile under its stubble.

  Louis persists. “Why don’t you come stay with me? Leave it with Beth for now. Let the dust settle—”

  “Mind your own fucking business, Martin.” Todd sits up at last, throwing back his shoulders. “The hell you think you are, my mother?” He wipes his arm across his brow and stares into his bottle.