Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  “You look like shit, you know that?” Louis says, but he tries to keep his voice kind.

  Todd shrugs. Shuffles his feet. Stares into the distance.

  “Oh, fuck it, why not?” He stands and moves toward the kitchen. “Me and you can have a good time—bros together and all that crap. Hit some bars or whatever.”

  This is not what Louis has in mind at all, but he keeps that to himself. Putting down his own beer, he rises, too. “I’ll wait while you get your stuff.”

  Todd rests his eyes on him a moment. Nods. Runs upstairs.

  Louis sends Beth a text warning her not to choose his house for refuge. Where she will go, he has no idea—not too far, he hopes, given she has his Camry. He also hopes she doesn’t choose to turn to Naema, who has had more than enough drama lately. But just in case, he writes her a text, too.

  Within minutes, Todd is downstairs again, rucksack on his back, duffel in one hand, a new six-pack in the other—Beth seems to have laid in quite a supply; not, perhaps, the wisest of decisions. “You seen Beth and Flanner?”

  “Yeah, they went to get something from the basement.” Louis hopes there is a basement.

  “Huh.” Todd follows Louis outside and looks around. “Where’s your car at?”

  “In the shop. Transmission trouble . . . I walked here.”

  Todd looks confused. “Oh. Guess we’ll have to take this piece of crap instead.” Unlocking the door of Beth’s rental Honda, he flings his gear in the back and looks over at Louis. “Let’s move. I don’t wanna have to explain anything. Beth can find another car, since she wrecked up mine.” He tosses over the keys and drops into the passenger seat, prying the cap off a new bottle. “You drive. I feel more like drinking.” Slapping the dashboard, he shouts, “Drive on, soldier.”

  Louis casts him a curious glance. Todd can’t seem to speak without sounding as though he is imitating somebody. Maybe it’s ordering all those Afghan trainees around, but he never used to talk like this and it doesn’t sit right on him. Louis knows plenty of Joes, jarheads, too, who can carry off this machismo act convincingly. Todd is not one of them.

  “So, are you healthy?” Louis says after they have been driving a few minutes. “Any aches, pains, Afghan bugs, or sucked-up wounds? ’Cause I have a plan if you are.”

  “I got Taliban grit up my ass and everything here looks phony as fuck. Otherwise, I’m fine.”

  “Good. How would you like to go hiking? I’m owed a few days off of work. We could head up to the Adirondacks. Swim. Camp. We could even rent a canoe.” Louis braces himself for mockery, but he is determined to make this happen. He doesn’t expect Todd to open up about whatever he’s been going through—it’s too soon, and Louis doesn’t need to hear it anyway. He can guess. Todd could have shot a kid in the face. Watched a buddy explode and get picked over by dogs. Screwed up a command and caused a whole squad to be blown to pieces. All the events of war bleed together into one long parade of savageries that gouge the soul and befoul the heart. . . . Yes, Louis knows all this, so why talk about it? But if he can get Todd away from town, away from those bars he’s pretending he wants to go to, and, most of all, away from Beth, perhaps the man will at least take the chance to think.

  “It’ll be cool and green, nothing like that pile of rocks you’ve been stuck in,” he adds. “Pine trees. Birds. Lakes.”

  Todd looks at him as if he’s speaking Martian. “What? I come home from war and you wanna turn me into a fucking Boy Scout? Are you out of your mind?”

  17

  MANTRA

  On the far side of town, Beth is hurtling through farms and up and down hills in Louis’s car, panic clutching her chest. She keeps checking the rearview mirror for Todd, expecting him to loom up behind her at any second, ram her off the road and drag her out. . . . She shakes her head, jerking the car out of its lane.

  “Mom!” Flanner cries from the back.

  “Sorry, honey, sorry.” She grips the steering wheel tighter.

  “Where are we going anyhow?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think.” She scans the darkening landscape, trying to calm herself enough to recognize where they are. Hills shading from green to gold. Farms sprinkled with a horse or two, cows and mud. Fields running to weed. Caved-in barns, abandoned silos. A lake covered in algae, a lone swan drifting across it like a puff of cotton. If only she could go to relatives, but her parents have retired to Miami, her brother lives in California, and her cousins have long since scattered. As for her friends at work, she doesn’t know any of them well enough for a humiliating moment like this. Still, she has to decide on somewhere. She can’t drive forever.

  She glances in the mirror at Flanner, who is glaring out of the side window, a long, sharpened stick across his lap, his freckled face brooding. “Flan, you okay?”

  “Dad’s a shithead.”

  Beth knows she should stand up for Todd, tell Flanner his father will get better once he’s over the war—that’s what the military parenting sites would advise. “What if we go to Tariq’s house?” she says instead. “His mom’s back from the hospital now, and you could play with him and get your mind off of . . . things.” Yes. Todd has never met Naema; he isn’t likely to think of tracking her there.

  Flanner’s mood does lift at that, but only for a second before the anger at both his dad and Tariq comes boomeranging back, along with the memory of Tariq watching him run like a rabbit from Mrs. Drummond and her wolf.

  “We don’t play, Mom. We’re too old to play. Can’t we just go someplace for dinner? I’m starving.”

  “I don’t have any money on me.” Beth left her purse in the house, along with her driver’s license and everything else she owns, aside from the cell phone in her pocket—maybe even her entire life. She draws in a long, thin stretch of air to steady herself. “I’m sure Tariq’s mom will give you something to eat. But you sound like you don’t want to go. Don’t you want to see your friend? I know you’ve been missing him.”

  Flanner fingers his stick, refusing to answer. He hates his mother now—for being hurt instead of angry, for crying all the time, for acting scared and weak and for not killing his dad. He hates Tariq, too. But he hates his father the most. That’s what the stick is for, carefully sharpened just the way he sharpened it for the wolves. He’s going to stab it into his dad when he’s asleep, right through the heart. Exactly the way you kill Dracula.

  When Beth knocks on Naema’s door, Naema opens it without surprise. “Ah, I thought it might be you. Louis sent me a message. Please, come in. Hello, Flanner. Nice to see you again. You will find Tariq in his room.”

  Flanner looks down at his feet. “I’ll stay out here.” He plods off into the yard, trailing his stick behind him.

  Naema is too struck by Beth’s appearance to notice. She only asks Beth to remove her shoes and ushers her inside. Mustapha has just left, his box of dates still on the coffee table. “Sit down, please. Would you like some water or tea?”

  Beth shakes her head, glancing behind her to make sure the front door is firmly closed. Sinking into an armchair, she covers her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t know where else to go. Oh, Naema. Oh God, I’m sorry, but would you mind locking your door?”

  Naema hesitates, thinking of Flanner, but then she complies, understanding the need for locked doors more than Beth could know. Carrying a chair over from the table, she sits opposite her. “It is good you came here to me. Now, let me look at you as a doctor.” She tilts a lamp to shine on her and leans forward.

  Beth shrinks back. Her domestic life, her marriage, and, above all, her failures are matters she has always kept to herself. But this luxury, like her dignity, seems to have been snatched away from her now. With a cold wash of shame, she removes her sunglasses, unties her scarf, and raises her face to the light.

  Naema examines her gently, lifting her eyelids one by one. Beth’s eyes are bloodshot, the left one swollen, its socket radiating red and violet. Her neck is chafed and streaked purp
le, her arms marked with the same rows of blue circles Louis noticed. “Your vision, is it blurred at all?”

  “A little, yes.” A dry sob wrenches out of Beth. To be touched gently like this after this past week feels like a kind of sleep, even a kind of forgiveness. It is all she can do not to collapse under the release of it.

  “And your throat? Can you swallow?”

  Beth wonders the same about Naema, her voice is so hoarse. “Yes, but it hurts to eat anything solid.”

  “Your esophagus, it is bruised, I suspect. Do not worry. It will recover.” Naema fetches an ice pack from the kitchen, gives it to Beth to hold over her eye, and then sits down again, folding her hands in her lap. “Please do not be embarrassed, but it would be best if you tell me, as a patient to a doctor, if your husband has hurt you anywhere else. I must make sure you are all right. You understand?” Naema has worked with the women and wives of the military for long enough to have guessed more or less what happened.

  Beth nurses her eye, equally unable and unwilling to answer. What Todd has been doing to her in the bedroom is not something she can even face, let alone talk about.

  After a tense silence, Naema changes tactics. “Come.” She rises to her feet. “You can put the ice down now. I will take you upstairs for a sleep. You need to rest.”

  “Thank you . . . but . . . you will keep the door locked, right? And get Flanner inside? In case . . . you know.”

  “I will. But you and Flanner are safe now. Louis has promised to stay with your husband and he will not let him come here. Follow me.”

  She leads Beth upstairs to her low-ceilinged bedroom, where the twilight seeping through its row of squat windows has draped the room in shadows. There, she feeds her a sedative, helps her change into a pair of soft, fern green pajamas, and tucks her under a bedspread she brought from Damascus, patterned in the lustrous oranges and reds of a pheasant’s breast feathers. Dimming the lamp, she sits beside her, stroking her hair. “Try to go to sleep now.”

  Beth squints up at her, the sedative already loosening her tongue. “I couldn’t leave. I tried, but he hid the car keys. . . . I should’ve called Louis before but . . . crying and saying sorry . . . I should’ve tried. . . .”

  “Shh, it is all right. None of this is your fault. Quiet now. You are safe.”

  “He followed . . . wouldn’t let me . . . I don’t . . .”

  Beth’s words tumble out in a frantic tangle, bumping up against one another, slurring and overlapping until, at last, they begin to subside, first to whispers, then to mumbles, and finally to whimpers. Naema remains by her side, stroking her head until she can see the sedative taking its hold.

  Rising carefully so as not to wake her, Naema gazes down at Beth’s bruised face, thinking how very long the reach of war turns out to be. The day she fled that Baghdad hospital, she assumed that, painful as it was to leave her country forever, she was at least leaving war as well. But instead, it has followed her everywhere. First to Syria. Then to the resettlement center in Albany with its refugees from all over the world, their faces emptied of joy, eyes drained by loss. Then again to the clinic, her patients sickened by the toxins their parents absorbed at war, or harmed by the violence those same parents brought home. And now it has followed her all the way here to her bedroom in Huntsville, New York, and her very own bed.

  Tariq is so absorbed in his latest book about wolves, he has no idea that Beth is upstairs or Flanner out in the yard. The book isn’t White Fang this time, Tariq having finished it in disgust—he couldn’t bear the way the wolf succumbed to servile dependence on that white man at the end—but another book, lent to him by Mrs. Drummond, full of pictures of wolves from all over the world. Snowy ones like Silver from Alaska. Small red ones from Europe. Timber wolves like Gray from Canada. Right now he is reading about the pups, their noses stubby, eyes deep blue, ears the shape of teddy bear ears, fur as fluffy as down. How he would love to have a wolf pup like that to take into bed with him on those nights when dreams tear at his sleep.

  He reaches over to switch on his bedside lamp, time having dialed the twilight down to a moonless evening, and turns to the section about the social order of packs. The alpha male and female, he reads contentedly, are the only wolves in a pack to have pups because the female, who comes into estrus only once a year, bullies the other females so badly they either miscarry or never ovulate at all (being the son of a doctor, Tariq knows perfectly well what this means). Meanwhile, the rest of the wolves take on specific jobs. The nannies guard the pups, and teach them how to fight and hunt and howl. The omegas protect the pack by clowning to deflect fights and diffuse tension. And the rest divide into hunters and trackers. But it is the alphas who run the show, controlling who grooms whom and when, where they hunt, who gets to eat which parts of the prey, and how they interact with other packs. The alphas look after everyone in return for unhesitating obedience, just as Mrs. Drummond explained to him about Gray.

  Tariq flips to the chapter about howling. Wolf pups practice howling from the minute they can stand, he learns, because howling is as complex as a language. There are howls to reach the rest of the pack when it has wandered away, howls to recognize family, howls to proclaim an alpha status, to court a mate, lead the pack on a journey, warn off rivals, defend one another. . . . And each wolf knows a wide variety of howls, yips, and growls to frighten off enemies by making the pack sound bigger than it is.

  A movement catches Tariq’s eye and he looks up just in time to see something flit by his window. Dropping the book, he reaches for one of his crutches and swings over, poking his face out with caution. “Who’s there?”

  “Me.”

  He leans farther out. “Flanner! What are you doing here?”

  Flanner ignores the question, so Tariq fits on his leg and heads out the back door. He still stings from the insults Flanner flung at him that day in the woods, so he approaches him with caution.

  Flanner is crouched on the grass, pretending to have found something intriguing.

  “What’s up?” Tariq asks.

  “Nothing.” Flanner stands and shows him the quarter he planted there before Tariq appeared. “Found this, since you’re so interested. And you can’t have it.”

  Tariq peers at it through the dark. “Who said I wanted it?” He eyes the sharp stick in Flanner’s other hand, which reminds him of their game about spearing wolves, and he feels a sudden gape of time between the kid he was then and who he is now, companion to Juney and Gray. “What are you doing with that stick?”

  “Hunting.”

  “Hunting what?”

  “Groundhogs. They’ve been digging holes in our basement, so Mom asked me to kill a few. I’m looking to see if you got any too.”

  This is such an obvious lie it only makes Tariq feel more distant from Flanner than ever. “Killed any yet?” he asks with a scoff.

  “Fuck you, lameleg! You think you’re so chill with your dumb wolves. I know. I saw. But just you wait.”

  The words are so unexpected, ripping into the gossamer veil over Tariq’s secret world, that any possibility of a comeback deserts him. “What do you mean?”

  Flanner grips his stick. “I know more than you think.”

  “You’re lying. You don’t know anything!”

  “Yeah I do. I saw you talking to that evil wolf. You and that crazy lady.”

  “What are you talking about? There’s nothing evil about Gray. And she isn’t crazy!”

  “Oh yeah, she is. But you and those wolves and that nutball are over for good, now. You’ll see!”

  “What are saying?” Tariq grabs Flanner’s arm in fright. “Did you tell somebody?”

  This is all Flanner needs. “Don’t touch me!” he screams. And he swings his stick as hard as he can at Tariq’s head.

  The scream wakes Beth instantly, cutting through sleep and sedative. “What’s that?” She sits upright, staring wildly at Naema. Before Naema can find the breath to answer, Beth is running downstairs.

 
; Naema forces her maddeningly uncooperative body across the room to look out the narrow window. She sees Beth flying across the yard, her green pajamas only just visible in the dark, bare feet flashing. She sees Flanner kicking something on the grass. She sees a dark shape lying by itself some distance away. And only then does it dawn on her that it is Tariq being kicked, Tariq curled in a ball on the ground, Tariq’s prosthesis torn off and cast aside. Turning with a cry, she pushes herself over to the door and stumbles as fast as she can down the stairs.

  Beth is grappling with Flanner now, pulling with all her strength to get him off his friend. “Stop! For God’s sake, stop!”

  “I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!” Flanner is shouting, fighting her hard, the sharpened stick in his hand grazing her cheek, nearly gouging an eye. She is forced to twist his arm violently—her own child!—to pry the stick loose. Throwing it out of reach, she seizes him by the shoulders and shakes him. “Stop! What’s the matter with you? What are you doing?”

  He struggles, still yelling, while she wrestles with him, panting from the effort, until she manages to pin his arms to his sides and hold his writhing, furious body tightly enough to control him.

  Naema reaches the yard at that moment, white-faced from lack of breath. Running over to Tariq, curled and sobbing on the grass, she drops to her knees beside him and takes his head in her hands, which are instantly drenched in blood. “Allah help us, are you all right, habibi? What has he done to you?”

  Although she is speaking Arabic, Beth understands. “Flanner hit him with that stick!” she gasps, still gripping Flanner tight. “I’m so sorry!”

  Naema examines Tariq’s head quickly. The blood is gushing from the top of his scalp. Quickly, she pushes apart his hair, searching for the wound. But it is too dark to see. Tears are mingling with the blood drenching his face and his stump is flailing in the grass. Naema pulls him onto her lap, cradling him and murmuring comfort just as she did when the bomb tore off his leg. She looks up at Flanner.